


The High Road

by tweedymcgee



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: Alien Biology, Bondage, Crossover, Dubious Science, Embarrassment, F/M, Fix-It, Fuck Or Die, Humor, M/M, Mind Sex, Poetry, Religion, Revenge, Situational Humiliation, Spaceships, Telepathy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-03
Updated: 2014-05-03
Packaged: 2018-01-21 18:48:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 27,620
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1560410
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tweedymcgee/pseuds/tweedymcgee
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ah, Donna, Donna, you deserved better. </p><p>Here we have your basic Ten/Donna AU shag-or-die Journey's End fixit. A deeply flawed three-hanky crackfest, stuffed with random NuWho cameos, bizarre biomechanical theories of Gallifreyan sexuality, authorial bitterness towards various aspects of canon, improbable slashy multi-era epic poetry crossovers, an uncomfortable dollop of religion, and a bracing highball of Captain Jack on the rocks. You know. Like you do.</p><p>No happy endings herein. Only just ones.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is an old one. The first one, even. I'm just getting around to archiving it on yon Ao3, lo these several years later. It's a hot mess. But it's _my_ hot mess.
> 
> Shabine, who has a brief cameo, is not mine, he's Derek Walcott's. So is the brief poetic excerpt, and a bit of his dialogue. I know I'm punching well above my weight class here. You should really be reading Walcott instead of this sort of thing. He's got a Nobel Prize in poetry, for God's sake. Well, now he's got some torrid fanfiction too. *rolls eyes at self*

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In Which a Tale of Two Ships Begins, Donna Noble is Bigger on the Inside, the Captain Is Restless, and Karaoke Happens.

For the thousandth time, Donna Noble dreams she's waking up. But waking up is dying. It's the same thing.

In the dream she feels the world getting brighter all around her. She tries to hang on to the dream within the dream. It's slipping away.

He's there. He's always there. His lips are moving, but she can't hear him. All she can hear is the sound of her own voice.

“No,” she says. “I can't. Don't make me.”

Maybe he can't hear her, either. His hands are reaching for her, excruciatingly slowly. Seconds become minutes become hours. She can't move. She's caught in time like a fly drowning in syrup.

“No,” she says, but the hands keep reaching. She can't stop it. His eyes are bright, burning. Time is eating him from the inside out, and it will eat her too. “No. No. No. No.”

And then she wakes up.

There's always a quick hot flare of relief, as she's coming up through the layers of the dream. And it always slips away, burning off like mist, like dreams do, just before she opens her eyes and the familiar weight of an old sadness presses down on her. The one she can bear.

Her eyes open. She remembers where she is. This is how time passes now. Slowly, and in the right order.

***

Several thousand years in the future, a desperate man was engaged in a lonely war against impossible odds.

So far, he was winning.

There would surely be no going back, if he failed. He'd burned more than one bridge behind him, including his own craft. He'd wired a vortex manipulator directly into the guts of the little one-man cargo vessel and ridden it as hard as he dared, and then harder, pushing it dangerously beyond its technical specifications. The vortex manipulator had been dirty to begin with, and by the time he was done with it, it was thoroughly stripped, already beginning to throw off small temporal anomalies.

By the time he found the great ship, it was close to death. It was a miracle he found it at all. He'd almost failed so many times already that his wildly improbable success hardly registered a blip of emotion in him. But there he was, finally standing there in the nerve center of the ship, breathing its stale forgotten air, amid all those cables and wires and dust.

There had been just one senile clockwork guardian, its left arm a shambles, to keep it in working order. Only a few traces remained of the original crew. Just the most irreplaceable parts. A single clouded eye. A heart, prone to tachycardia, in a womblike cubby, kept on a strict diet of warm saline mist every three and a half minutes. The few rats left on board had developed a healthy fear of the whir of clockwork; the ship was strung like a Christmas tree with the nerves of their grandrats and great-grand-rats.

Still, she was a nice piece of engineering. Pretty, even. There was potential here. She had one hell of a long-range teleport system – why he'd picked her in the first place. Redundant systems all over the place. Beautiful.

And she still had that unmistakable smell about her that meant his quarry had been here, faint though it was. Ozone, and a subtle whiff of burnt toast. He knew it from his dreams, and his memories, though it was hard to tell which was which these days.

The man got to work quickly. There was so much to do. It didn't take him long to begin putting things to rights. For starters, there were still half-open links all over the place. Closing them freed up two-thirds of the ship's power for more useful purposes.

Like charting the slow course to a poisoned star. And equipping her with the jerry-rigged shields she'd need to survive its light. He could scavenge those from the skins of her lifeboats; they were too short-range to be useful to him anyway, out in the black where he was headed.

He'd brought as much equipment as he could stuff aboard the little craft he'd piloted out to where – and when – she was moored. Masses of cables and sensors and circuit boards. A box of recently-upgraded teleport bracelets. And two great round glass lenses, eight feet in diameter, impregnated with conductive siliconite, and ground by hand to nanoscopic perfection. Packed in three layers of reactive shock absorbers. He had come too far to take chances.

The man sat cross-legged on the deck, a fistful of wires in each hand, laser splicer between his teeth, stripping and examining and reconnecting. He hummed while he worked. It was an oddly cheerful sound, from a man who'd long since stopped indulging in the luxury of hope.

***

On another ship, in another time, the Doctor was losing another hard-fought battle.

“There is no way you are ever going to persuade me that murky swill you drink on a daily basis is fit for consumption, human or otherwise,” said the Doctor, putting a kettle on.

Jack Harkness winked one blue eye at the Doctor from across the galley table. “Sot in my ways, Doctor,” he said. “I'm not much of a tea man.”

“Let me get this straight. You'll have threesomes with sentient hat-racks, but you won't try a nice spot of tea in the morning for a change? Come on, live dangerously. I've got a lovely tippy Assam.” The Doctor opened a cabinet.

“You can have my coffee mug when you pry it from my cold dead hands,” said Jack, enjoying himself. “Prepare to wait a few billion years.”

“Tea is a civilizing influence on you lot. Not to mention a great comfort in the infinite vastness of space.” The Doctor reached a long arm into the cabinet, rummaged among a precarious jumble of tins and boxes, hesitated over a large box of PG Tips, and settled on a beat-up and rather Gallifreyan-looking tin labeled “Special TARDIS Blend” in a fine and flowing script.

“Coffee, on the other hand, makes you want to shoot people. Do you know who drinks coffee? Slavemasters and cowboys.”

“No coffee, no guns, no threesomes with hat-racks. Doctor, you lead a joyless existence.” Jack grinned. “What'll you have, Donna?”

Donna Noble, leaning on the galley table, waved a noncommittal hand. “Either, you nutters,” she said, without looking up from her hefty textbook. She scribbled something in the margin.

The Doctor loomed gawkily over her shoulder to see what page she was on.

“Oi! Do you mind?” She swatted at him.

“Awwww! Still stuck on matrix maths?” He frowned. Donna picked up the book and waggled it at him threateningly.

“Yes, you great swotty alien, I am still _stuck_ on matrices, thank you, it's been a whole three weeks since I started on them. Not done assimilating every piece of matrix maths in the known universe yet. Shocking, I know.”

Jack raised an eyebrow at them from across the room. “Hey, Donna, is this man bothering you?” His tone was light, but he gave the Doctor a pointed look.

“Perpetually,” said Donna, rolling her eyes.

Sometimes he fretted over her like a mother hen, fussing at her if she tackled too much at once or stayed up too long reading. Other times, he was seized with a sort of demented zeal for some topic or other she'd gotten curious about, and he took it on himself to play tutor, quizzing her without mercy. She found his glee over her growing thirst for knowledge both fun and exasperating, in roughly equal measure.

Donna spent a lot of her spare time lately working out problems, engrossed in books and games and spare bits of machinery lying around the TARDIS. At first it had just been something to do while she was too weak to do much of anything else. Then she'd gotten hungry for it. The Doctor had encouraged her, scouring the library daily for more fodder, inventing his own puzzles for her to tackle. There was a freshness about it, like the smell of new pencils and leather bindings, that she hadn't felt in years. And she learned fast now. Faster than she ever had in school.

It was a blessed relief, after the awful events on the Crucible, to have something to do. She tried not to spend much time pondering her older memories. Some of them, she knew, had never happened – not to her, anyway. Others made no sense, vivid images floating unmoored in time and space. The smell of bacon frying, all shot through with excitement, for no reason she could remember. A horrible looming Santa: was that from her childhood, or a trip to Marks & Spencer last Christmas?

The past was coming back to her – but with excruciating slowness, and in no particular order. Sometimes whole memories, whole timelines, would spring into her mind fully-formed, as though she'd never forgotten them. Others eluded her. She'd woken up one night weeping for her dead father; she couldn't remember his name.

Learning was much easier than remembering. Anything with equations tended to stick. Logic was like bricks you could build with. Circuits made orderly paths through a confusion of possibilities. And sometimes, when she was deep in a tangle of mathematics, she'd feel something settle in her, as if a stray piece of her fragmented mind had clicked into its rightful place.

“Ooh. That reminds me. Got a new one for you,” the Doctor said with a conspiratorial air, producing a slender paperback from his trouser pocket. She sighed and rolled her eyes at him. The little books were usually much worse than the big ones. “Here. Have a whack at that. Notation's a bit odd, but it's more theory than you'll get out of that textbook.”

“You absolute _sadist_ ,” she hissed, flipping to a page midway through. He flashed an innocent smile at her. “I'll have that coffee, Jack.”

***

Hands trembling, the man aboard the black freighter punched instructions into the keyboard of the cryogenic capsule. Everything was ready. Finally.

It should have taken him just a few months, in biological time, to reach the Andromeda galaxy. But he'd woken up halfway through the voyage to the sound of alarms, and a miasma of pain that reached down to him and hauled him up through a tunnel of darkness into its white-hot arms.

He flailed, and saw the capsule open and the clockwork demon standing over him, his own right eye in its golden claw. Stupid, stupid. He had smashed it beyond recognition, and patched himself up as best he could with help from the cryo capsule's biorhythmic manipulator. But he didn't dare go into deep cryo again with the ship in flight.

By the time he arrived at his destination, his hair had long since gone white. Never mind. It would be worth it.

He worked feverishly to place the device on the planet's surface. Still, it took the better part of two years, half of it wasted wrestling with an artronic prism that had to be rebuilt from scratch anyway in the end. He was clumsy with the loss of his depth perception, weak from long spaceflight. Having to stick to working nights was an extra handicap. Though, he thought ruefully, he wasn't much good at going without sleep these days anyway. So old. Older every day.

He'd sleep now, until the signal came. He still didn't trust the ship, but he had no choice now. He was running out of time.

A thick ponytail of cable hung from the end of the capsule, snaked further into the bowels of the ship. Ugly piece of engineering, a kludge really, but it would hold. He lowered himself into the coffin-like capsule and pulled the lid closed from inside. He felt the cold, before it dissolved into the vague twilight of a dream.

 

***

It had been weeks since Donna had had a relapse. They'd almost hoped she was out of the woods.

She was good at hiding it. A little too good. The Doctor had mistaken the brightness in her eyes, the flush in her cheeks, for ordinary high spirits. It had been an exciting day. Lots of running involved.

But when she'd started casually speaking Racnoss at the dinner table, then forgotten how to use her fork, he uttered a few choice words under his breath and pushed his plate away.

“Donna,” he said.

“H'ksarrah shaartoth n'tsc cnyaar,” she prattled to Jack, ignoring him.

“Donna, all right now, take it easy. You've got to rest.”

“Oh, put a sock in it, sunshine,” she said. “I was just telling Jack about the time Nerys and I made war on a legion of ancient she-demons spawned in a ghost nebula. They were feeding. Breeding. Speeding. Seceding. Secreting. Central heating. Eton, Leaton, Buster Keaton.”

“Donna.” he said. “Never happened. Come on now. You're not well.”

She opened her mouth to protest, then stopped, sagging against the table. “Oh. Ow, my _head_.”

“Come on, easy now,” he said, helping her to her feet, leading her down the hall to her room.

Jack didn't stop him. He'd been content to leave the two of them alone more often, lately. The Doctor wasn't sure what he'd done to earn the man's trust, but he was glad of it. Donna's bad days were hard enough without the Captain hovering over his shoulder like a tetchy chaperone.

The Doctor helped her onto the bed and took off her shoes. She curled into a fetal position.

He left her there, headed back to the galley to fix something hot for her. They didn't have the right herbs, naturally, but it was a reasonable enough imitation.

He didn't ever dare give her an aspirin. Just in case.

When he returned, she was a little more herself again.

“I'm all right, you know,” she said, propped against the pillows, her face looking drawn and pale in the bright tangle of her hair.

“I know bollocks when I hear it, and that is one hundred percent pure bollocks,” he said.

“I am though.”

“Bollocks squared. Bollocks to the bollocks power.”

“Really. I'm getting better.”

“Yes, you are getting better. Doesn't mean you can just run yourself into the ground and not expect to pay for it later,” he said. He sat down next to her, hoisted his long legs onto the bed, and put an arm around her shoulders. “Drink that.”

Donna took a sip, and set the mug down. She shot a regal, disparaging glance at his trainers. “People take their shoes off, you know. In other people's beds.”

“I'm not people,” he said. “How's the head?”

“Full of Vikings. With swords.”

He touched her arm, and looked at her until she met his eyes. “Let me,” he said.

“Oh. Not that again.”

“Donna.”

She turned toward him, squeezing her eyes shut.

The Doctor took her face in his hands and stroked her temples with long fingers. Not probing, just making contact, letting her get used to the sensation.

“All right,” she said, weary. And then she felt him move into her mind, vast and fluid, like a great dark fog bank rolling across the sky.

“Tell me if it hurts,” he said.

She clenched her teeth. “Every time. I feel you in there. I feel you making me stupid,” she said.

“Shhhhhh. Try to relax,” he said. “You've got to be patient. Little steps every day. You can walk all the way around a planet that way.”

Words as much for himself as for her. He knew he'd been guilty of pushing her too hard. Expecting too much too soon.

He was trying not to rush her. Honestly. It was just so nice, having somebody around to talk to, about, you know, Time Lord things. Eigenvectors. Three-dimensional chess. Bananas.

Even without probing, he could sense the immense size of her unconscious mind, his own psionic rhythms echoing back to him. In the half-darkness, beneath consciousness, vast living shapes lay sleeping, curled around one another. Let them sleep. He felt gingerly for the bulwark protecting her waking mind, built of her own native psychic tissue and reinforced with living grafts from the alien consciousness that now twined through every synapse of it. (His, but not his. Something new.)

He found what he was looking for: a coil of root-like tendrils, new and crackling and fizzing with life. He felt the tiny fissures in the protective wall where they'd gained a foothold and grown, quick and hot, now pulsing from within with a brilliant intoxicating light. Seizures, they'd called them in her time – clusters of neurons firing fast and furious, hundreds of times per second. So excited, so much to share. _There now. Be still._

Donna relaxed a little and opened her eyes. “Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer, dooooooo,” she sang, in her best dying-evil-computer voice. “I'm...haaaalf...craaaaa...zyyyyyyyy...all for the looooooove...of yoooooooouuuuuuuuu...”

“Oh, don't be dramatic.” He arched one eyebrow at her.

She smiled up at him. “Pot. Kettle.”

He stood up and bent to kiss her forehead. “Night, Donna.”

“Goodnight, Martian.”

He closed her door quietly.

Back in the galley, Jack was standing at the sink in a T-shirt and braces, washing up. “How is she?” he asked, without turning around.

The Doctor's mouth tightened. “Better. A little. I think. At this rate, she'll be right as rain in another century or two,” he said bitterly.

“We're all damaged goods, Doctor,” said Jack.

“Speak for yourself,” he said, provoking a snort from the captain.

“While I've got you alone,” said Jack, turning to meet the Doctor's gaze, and drying a plate. “Are you ever going to show me how the neutrino backfeed regulator works? You did promise.”

“You really think you're ready for that?”

“Ready as I'll ever be.”

“That depends, Jack,” the Doctor said, leaning back against the cupboards, arms crossed, radiantly smug. “Have you been a very good boy?”

Jack put down the dishtowel and turned around, suddenly grim. He laid one hand flat against the cupboard beside the Doctor's head, leaning in close to the other man's face.

“Fuck's sake. Quit writing checks you can't cash, Doctor,” said Jack.

The Doctor's eyes went wide with surprise. One of his hearts hammered faster in his chest. “What?” he squeaked.

“I mean it. Cut it out,” Jack said, giving the Doctor a piercing look. “You say jump, I say, 'How high?' To the ends of the earth. But don't mess with me.”

The Doctor asserted more control over his vocal cords. “What?”

“Doctor. I don't know how your species does things, but there are systems where the level of flirting you engage in on a daily basis constitutes a legally binding contractual obligation. Just so you know.”

The Doctor swallowed hard, blinking.

“Backfeed regulator, though. Seriously.” Jack stepped back, smoldering a bit less.

“Right,” he said, running a hand through his disastrously unruly hair. “About time you knew how to work that. Come on.”

 _Humans,_ he thought. _You'd think a man who's going to outlive the known universe would have a little more patience._

***

Jack was getting itchy.

The Doctor didn't notice, or pretended not to. But it was clear to Donna that the captain was chafing a little at domestic life aboard the TARDIS. He had taken to disappearing for longer and longer stretches during their planetside visits, returning to the rendezvous point moody and taciturn, sometimes with bruises he didn't bother explaining.

The man had – well, _needs_ , there was no point denying it. But it wasn't just that. There was some unspoken conflict between Jack and the Doctor, and it was getting worse. Clearly Jack wanted more from the Doctor than he was prepared to give, but Donna didn't think that was the whole story.

One night, she finally broached the topic. They'd touched down near some third-rate twentieth-century karaoke bar, just for the hell of it – the three of them on a rare night out on the town, all together.

“You're a million miles away, aren't you?” Donna peered at Jack over her second gin and tonic.

Jack flashed her a smile that would launch a thousand ships. “Just sizing up likely prospects.”

“Bollocks,” she said. “There's nothing in here you'd want to wake up next to.” It was a fact.

“D'you suppose he's actually drunk?” Jack waved his glass in the general direction of the Doctor, who was up on stage, tie knotted around his forehead, singing his hearts out.

“Yes. Drunk on attention,” Donna smiled indulgently.

“I think you're just what I needed,” the Doctor wailed, to the great and visible delight of half a dozen spray-tanned bachelorettes at a table in the back. “I needed someone to feed.”

“I wonder if all Time Lords were this shit at keeping a low profile,” said Donna.

“You weren't half-bad yourself. I didn't know you had all that Bonnie Tyler in you,” said Jack.

“What you don't know about me could fill a book, Jack Harkness,” she said, then let out a short sharp bark of laughter. “Ha. That makes two of us. I don't know squat about me either.”

“Oh, don't get all moody on me, Donna. We're having a good time. Well, he is, anyway.”

The last of the Time Lords bounded three feet straight up in the air, coattails flaring, and launched into an enthusiastic air guitar solo.

“We've got to get him out of here before he does 'Me and Bobby McGee,' or we'll have a riot on our hands,” she said.

“No kidding.”

She turned to him and looked him straight in the eye. “Jack, talk to me,” she said, eyes alive with concern. “What's eating you?”

“You don't miss a trick, do you?” Jack swirled the ice and whiskey in his glass.

“I'm serious. I worry about you. You get a sort of _Mutiny On The Bounty_ look about the gills sometimes.”

Jack raised an eyebrow at her. He'd never outright defied the Doctor. Well, just the once. But that had, he reflected, been thoroughly justified.

“I've been thinking about having you drop me off in Cardiff again, when we make our next pit stop. I haven't decided yet.”

“Cardiff!” she said. “All the amazing places in the universe, and you want to go to Cardiff. What've they got there? Cheese? Vowels?”

“I might not take off just yet. He's been good as his word, he's taught me a lot of temporal mechanics, and I've still got a lot to learn. I'm tempted to stay on a bit longer.” Jack twirled the glass back and forth in his hand. “But I'm not him. I can't go on like this forever, Donna. You know that. He knows that.”

Donna's mouth tightened. It was almost painful, watching Jack and the Doctor dance around each other. They hardly even talked to one another anymore, unless it was through her.

“Oh, Jack,” she sighed. “I won't ask you to stay. But I will miss you. And he won't say it, but I know he will, too.”

Jack drained the glass, and glared at it for being so insolently empty.

Donna's second cocktail was making her soppy. “You don't know how grateful I am you've been with us these past few months.”

“I wouldn't have missed it.”

It had been longer than that. After the metacrisis, Donna had spent almost six months in a state of acute temporal disorientation, unable to form new memories. _No point telling her_ , Jack thought, for the hundredth time.

“I needed you, you know.” She plucked a stray bit of lint off her blouse, her face suddenly crimson. It was true. She owed Jack a great deal. It just wasn't like her to be so sentimental.

“Somebody had to keep an eye on you two hooligans.” He put his hand over hers. “When I do go, though – you take care of yourself, Donna, you hear? I know he means well, but he doesn't have the best track record with passengers.”

“Oh, don't you worry about me, Jack Harkness,” she said. “Just don't you dare run off without saying goodbye properly.”

Jack cocked his head, listening intently.

“You know, Donna,” he said, taking her by the elbow and steering her toward the microphone, “I've... had... the time of my life... and I've never felt this way before...”

“Oh, you horrible man! No!” Donna shrieked with delight.

They had to run for it, as usual, after a chavvy-looking catfight erupted over the Captain, and the Doctor's confusion over the proper denominations of local currency had gotten them in a world of trouble with the management.. They stumbled through the TARDIS door, out of breath, all three of them laughing so hard they couldn't stand up. Just like old times.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In Which Time Goes Wibbly, There Is Curious Business Aboard the S.S. Madame de Pompadour, a Shameful Memory is Exhumed, and a Trap is Sprung.

Back in Cardiff, a few days and a few decades later, a hero's welcome was waiting for them, in the form of a very excited Gwen Cooper. The Doctor found all the fuss she was making vaguely embarrassing, and set about making a thorough examination of a pile of alien flotsam.

Gwen leaped on Jack, wrapping him in a tremendous bear hug. Ianto hung back, looking wary, but his eyes were bright.

“Don't get too excited, we're not staying,” said Jack. “Just a pit stop. Gotta refuel. And somebody's run out of milk again.”

Donna smiled to herself. Brilliant. At least one more chance to beat the tar out of him at the poker table, then.

“No! You can't go!” Gwen protested. “It's been weeks! Jack, we need you!”

“Don't worry, Cooper,” Jack winked at her. “Just a few more galaxies to visit. I'll be back in time for tea. Isn't that right, Doctor? Tea time. Today. August 14, 2008. Cardiff. Earth.” He grinned at the Doctor.

“Oh, sure, sure. I'll put it on the to-do list,” the Doctor said, not really paying attention.

“As long as you don't run off with all our best stuff this time,” snapped Ianto, glaring at the Doctor. “Still got that psionic transference ray, I hope? We could've used it on Tuesday.”

The Doctor looked thoroughly confused. “What are you on about?”

“Are you kidding me?” Ianto began striding around the room in a rare high dudgeon of irritation, mussing his hair and pointing the Flake bar he was eating at various bits of alien machinery, in a fairly credible impression of the Doctor. “'Oh, I'll be needing this one. Just for a tick, you know, be right back with it soon as I've – ooooooh, look at that! Oh, you beauty! You're coming with me!' Come on, Doctor. You nicked half our equipment bay. Stuff we hadn't even figured out what it was for yet. At least you left us the guns.”

Gwen shook her head. “Ianto. _Ianto_. He hasn't been here yet, from his point of view. Remember? He told us that.”

“Right.” Ianto conceded, still grumpy. “I'll never get used to that.”

Neither would the Doctor. He hated tripping over his own timeline. The future bits, anyway. Future selves were forever getting the upper hand on a person.

“So I'm going to be here in the past? What for? What did I take? No no no, on second thought, don't tell me, I don't want to know,” he spluttered, as Gwen launched into an exhaustive list. “I can't have you telling me what I'm going to have done last week next February, it's cheating.”

Gwen retrieved a small slip of paper from a desk drawer. “You did say to give you this, when you turned up next,” she said, handing it to him. “Said you'd found something interesting.”

He took it from her gingerly, bracing himself for the nasty shock of a minor time paradox as he unfolded it. They tended to feel a bit like getting zapped by a statically-charged doorknob. If the doorknob was the size of a horse, and you'd just crossed a hectare of shaggy carpet to get to it.

He peeked at it with one eye. Not too bad. Must not be all that important in the greater arc of history, then.

It was a handwritten note in Gallifreyan – interconnecting circles, like clockwork cogs. The message was brief, just a set of space/time coordinates. Cryptic. But then again, he would be, in the unlikely event he'd want to tell his own past self something.

“Donna!” Jack shouted. “Don't feed the pterodactyl. Seriously. Not a good idea. Anyway, it doesn't eat chips.”

“Oh! But she's lovely!” Donna exclaimed, reluctantly backing away from the creature. “Who's a good girl, then? Who is?”

From across the room, Ianto caught the captain's eye. Jack moved toward him, a half-smile on his lips. He leaned on Ianto's shoulder, speaking low into his ear. “Hey, I missed you too, Jones. Can you tell?”

“It's not that. Listen,” said Ianto. “You weren't here.”

“'Scuse me?”

“With him. He was here a week ago. Without you. So where were you? He was very vague on that point.”

“Ianto, the man's almost a thousand years old. It could have been decades from now, from his point of view. Anyway, I'm coming back here soon. A month of my time, tops.”

“That reminds me. How long have you been gone this time? No. Don't answer that. I don't want to hear you lie,” Ianto muttered, not looking at Jack.

Jack's grip on Ianto's shoulder tightened, and his voice turned cold. “Why? You in a hurry for me to use up all my time with you?”

Ianto hated to admit it, even to himself, but Jack had a point. “Just be careful,” he said.

Jack grinned. “Come on. What could possibly happen to me?”

 

***

“Nobody goes out that door til I give the all-clear,” said the Doctor, raising his voice to be heard over the _vworp_ of the TARDIS materializing on the bridge of a massive spaceship moored somewhere in the Andromeda galaxy. “I really, really don't fancy running into myself today. I'm going to scan the area for electronic activity. Thoroughly. Any sign of another TARDIS, we're off.”

“No arguments from me,” said Donna. “I'd just as soon not find out what flavor of Pop-Tart you'll be replacing me with in the future.”

“Hey! I thought I was the Pop-Tart,” Jack said, miffed.

The Doctor jabbed at a screen with the sonic screwdriver, pretending not to hear them.

“Nope,” he said, giving the plosive 'p' a little extra oomph, and clicking his teeth together for dramatic effect. “No dimensionally transcendental quantum biomechanical entities here. Just your basic fifty-first century transport ship, getting a little long in the tooth. In fact. Wait. No. Yes. Oh yes! Will you look at that! Unbelievable. Absolutely unbelievable.”

“Not more Oort cloud hagfish, I hope,” said Jack.

“No, looks like we've dodged that bullet today,” said the Doctor. “But this is really peculiar. I do believe I've met this ship before. Yes indeed, the harmonic resonance signature from her proton drive matches perfectly, now that's just weird. She was empty and drifting, last time I saw her. And in a completely different galaxy. You're a long way from home, old girl.”

“Doctor, when were you here?” Jack asked.

The Doctor heard the question, ignored it, and sped up the pace of his monologue a little. “Looks like she's had a bit of an upgrade,” he said. “Someone's boosted her muon thrusters, or she'd never have made it this far. It can't have been more than half a century since I last set foot on her, and she's traveled almost a million light-years since then. Oh, wouldn't I just love to have a look at that odometer.”

“Who's on board?” Donna asked.

“Who knows?” he said, grinning hugely. “Ship looks empty. Cold as an old teapot. No biomorphic heat patterns on board. But that certainly doesn't rule out everything.”

“Can't we, you know, hail her or something?”

“Sure!” said the Doctor. He buzzed at the screen again, and a small videocam peered up helpfully from behind it. “Hail away, Donna.”

“Hallooooo,” she said, peering into the cam. “Um. We come in peace.”

No answer.

“Well, that wasn't very conclusive, was it?” said the Doctor. “Guess we'll just have to find out for ourselves. Let's have a look at that ship's computer, shall we?”

“I'm on it,” said Jack, pulling a chair up to the console and tapping out a few practiced keystrokes. _That man's getting to be quite the ace TARDIS operator_ , the Doctor thought to himself, not for the first time.

“Doctor, this is really weird,” said Jack. “There's no user interface that I can find. There's not even a processing language. Just raw code. And look at the code, it's really bizarre.”

The Doctor put his glasses on and peered over the captain's shoulder. “Incredible. Just incredible,” he said. “Definitely wasn't like that last time.”

“That's computer code? Looks like just a bunch of symbols to me. What's the big deal?” Donna asked.

“Look how many different kinds of symbols there are,” the Doctor said. “Even in the fifty-first century, they should still be using binary processing. Zeroes and ones. This uses four different symbols. Quaternary logic, that's practically beyond the capacity of the ship's processors to handle. There's no way that came factory-installed. Somebody would have had to translate every line of that code. It must have taken ages.”

“Why would anybody do that?” said Jack. “Unless they're a complete masochist. What can you do with four symbols that you can't do with two? You'd get more computing juice, sure, if you had the hardware to go along with it. But pimping out a processor designed for binary logic with a bunch of quaternary code?”

“Right. There wouldn't be much point. Unless – you know, I've seen something a little like this before.” The Doctor scratched his head. “It was a computer with biological components. Primitive thing. Took three minutes to solve a basic differential equation. Hardly any graphics processing at all. Lovely, though. It used genetic sequences as raw input strings. Stick a couple of Euthanian flatworms in there and it could run a server.”

“Oh, that is cool,” said Jack.

“Genetic sequences?” Donna didn't get the connection.

“Genes are written with four letters. Four kinds of nucleotides,” the Doctor said. “Pretty much every life form in the universe is based on a four-symbol code.”

“So, what, there's a dish of DNA on board somewhere, computing interstellar vectors?” Donna said.

“Could be,” said the Doctor. “Maybe not. Just a guess.”

“Can you tell what the code is doing by looking at it?” said Jack.

“Sure, probably, if I had a few months to work it out,” the Doctor said. “I tell you what we can do, though. We can see which code is driving which parts of the ship. And have a look at that big old computer. Maybe it's full of alien DNA. Wouldn't that be fun?” The Doctor leaped to his feet and disappeared through a door at the end of the console room. He emerged a minute later with an outrageously large and lethal-looking gun.

“Whoa, there, cowboy,” said Jack, ducking.

“Don't worry, it's just a datajacker,” he said. “Observe.”

They followed him out the door of the TARDIS, across a long metal deck, and down a narrow crawlspace to a pair of sliding doors. The Doctor pushed the door-activation button, stuck his head in to check for angry life forms, and waved them through with the gun. “Humans first,” he said. “Bingo! The central processor. Donna, Jack, meet computer. Computer, meet my crew.”

“I don't see any goopy bits,” said Donna.

“They wouldn't be on the outside, necessarily,” said the Doctor. He bounded across the terminal and grabbed a fistful of cable. “But look here. Tubes! Ooh, I love tubes. Just the thing for getting stuff from Point A to Point B.”

He fanned a thick rope of cables out on the floor and pushed the muzzle of the gun against a thick black cord. “Blammo! Look at that, Jack.” He flipped a small glowing screen up from the side of the gun. “See? That's the active commands going to and from whatever thingy that cable connects to. Not much in that one, just a few megs.”

“You haven't got a spare one of those things, have you, Doctor?” Jack looked the gun over admiringly.

“My toy, Jack!” he said. He began testing the rest of the cables, one by one. “Did I check that one yet? Ooh, I should've tied a string around it. Has anybody got a string? Oh, here we go. String. Never leave home without it – oh, marvelous.”

The Doctor held up a thick green cable. “Jackpot.”

Donna peered at the screen on the gun. A rush of code streamed across the little glowing square. The Doctor buzzed at it with his screwdriver, and a more helpful-looking interface appeared.

“Look at that. There's just massive amounts of data flowing through that cable. Massive! Enough to steer ten ships this size. Where's that cable going to? Let's find out!” He twisted a dial on the gun barrel, took aim at the cable again and fired. “Tracer pulse! Looks like it's coming from – that way! Go, go, go!”

They ran down a couple of blind alleys before they found the teleporter console.

“A teleporter? Why would anybody feed this much data into a bleeding _teleporter_?” the Doctor said. He sounded almost disappointed. “It must be transmitting wirelessly to something on the other end. Something a lot more exciting. This is just your standard remote teleport console – single-link, looks like. Pretty spiffy one, but still, it doesn't require fifteen bloody terabytes per second to run it.”

“There's another cable, too,” said Jack. “Look at this.” He held up a massive black rope of cable feeding into the teleporter. 

The Doctor took aim at it, fired, peered at the screen, and blew a resounding raspberry. He held up the screen so Jack could see. A single symbol blinked on and off. “That's not going in, it's coming out. Just one bit. Same one, over and over, going blip blip blip blip. Not very exciting.”

“Oh, I don't know about that,” said Jack. “Sometimes – ”

But Donna cut him off, excitedly plucking a teleport bracelet from a rack beside the console. “What are you two waiting for? Let's find out what's on the other end of that great whacking signal!”

The Doctor grinned. “Could be aliens,” he said.

“Could be,” she agreed.

“Big dangerous aliens.”

“Horrible ones. Green, with tentacles.”

“My favourite kind. Jack?” The Doctor held up a bracelet and waggled it invitingly.

“You two go get yourselves killed. I'd like to have a look at what else that computer is up to. If you don't mind leaving that datajacker in my possession, Doctor.”

“Suit yourself,” the Doctor said. “ _Allons-y_!”

***

The first thing the Doctor noticed about their present surroundings was the spectacular eight-foot-wide circular glass window, which looked out on a lifeless glittering wasteland. Hard to miss, really. The spherical room they were in was smaller than a one-room Chelsea flat.

The second was that they were very, very lucky not to be dead.

“D'you recognize it?” he asked Donna, waving a hand at the moonlit valley beyond the foot-thick glass of the porthole.

“Should I?” Donna shrugged.

“Did you even bother to look out the window last time we were here? You're the one who wanted to come. 'Oooh, Doctor, look at the brochure, they've got a swimming pool the size of Battersea Park.'”

“Midnight!” she gasped. “We're on Midnight?”

“Good thing it is midnight. I mean, that it's nighttime,” he said. “Sunlight through that window would have fried us to a crisp in five minutes flat.”

“What is this place?” Donna spun around, taking in the strange little podlike room. Apart from the thick glass window, the entire inner surface of the sphere was bristling with electronics: blinking lights, glistening ropes of cable, layers upon layers of gadgets and sensors and circuits.

In the center of the room, tilted up at a rakish angle to face the great glass porthole, was a featureless, rectangular slab of pitted metal. It looked oddly bare amid the riotous jumble of silicon and metal.

The Doctor aimed his sonic screwdriver at a nearby wall. “Whatever it is, this is the whole thing,” he said. “There's no other metal around here for miles. Just one teeny little pod, with a very scenic view, and more technology in it than five Chula warships.” His eyes were dark and wide as he took in the fractal array of gadgets.

Deep beneath coral-like reefs of metal and silicon, spidery claws were stirring. Donna noticed. “Doctor,” she said, nervously.

He was busy sonicating an intimidating squid-like object protruding from the ceiling, and not having much luck at it. “This is just weird,” he said. “There's sonic dampers on everything. I can't get a read on any of this stuff. This thing here is clearly a hair dryer, from the look of it. Pretty advanced one, but still. Why would anybody put a sonic damper on a hair dryer?”

“Doctor, don't you think we'd better go soon?” Donna cast a baleful eye on a cluster of green lights that hadn't been blinking a moment ago.

“Just a minute. Oh, but this is brilliant!” He ran his hands across the surface of the glass, testing its curvature, sniffed it and gave it an experimental lick. “No ordinary glass here, Donna. See how the moonlight goes all bristly at the edges?”

Bristly? The man was mental. She squinted at the glass. “Not really.”

“Try to relax your eye muscles a little. Look straight at it, but pretend you don't care.”

She gave it a go. Nope. Definitely not bristly. Wait. “Oh!” she gasped. “There! Oh, I had it for a minute. That's so – oh, I could almost taste it! It felt sort of – salty. Sharp.”

“There you are! We'll make a Time Lord of you yet, Donna Noble.” He grinned wildly.

“What does it do?” Now she was as intrigued as he was.

“It's not a window at all. It's an energy lens. I've never seen one this size. Mostly they're little things, you know, for charging your mobile from across the room. By the end of the twenty-first century, you won't need those rubbish charger cables anymore. But one of this size...” He stepped back as far as he could, leaning against the metal slab to get a good view of the window. “It's tremendous. You could power an interstellar transport ship with it.”

He ran a hand through his hair, visibly thinking. “That's it,” he barked, making Donna jump. “That's what it's for. Got to be. Power for the ship.”

“That ship? The one we just came from? It's running off energy from here?” Donna asked.

“No, that's the funny thing,” he said. “There's no energy source here. No sign of there ever having been one, either. And the room's so tiny. You'd need something small and incredibly powerful. Like a controlled nuclear explosion.”

The Doctor tried a few more frequencies, then gave up, tucking the sonic screwdriver back into his jacket pocket with an irritated sigh. “Maybe that's what all this is for,” he said, waving a hand at the gadget-encrusted walls. “Controlling the power source. Channeling it, focusing it. If there was one, I mean.”

“Fascinating,” said Donna. “But, really, Doctor – don't you think we'd better go?”

“Of course,” he said, suddenly serious. “Sunrises aren't all that picturesque around these parts. And we certainly don't want to run into any locals.”

“Just one thing first,” said Donna. She fished in her coat pocket for her mobile, held it up to the great round lens, and snapped a picture. “There. He'll just love that.”

“Who, Jack? Hardly seems like his sort of scenery.” The Doctor smirked.

“No, dumbo, not Jack. You know. I – ” She stopped, suddenly lost. “My – oh, hell.”

He watched her struggle for words for a moment.  “Wilf?” he asked, quietly.

A nasty tone crept into her voice. “Wilf. Who's that, one of your little space friends I'm supposed to remember? Who are you on about this time, Martian? Always blah, blah, blah, oh look at me, I'm the lord of time, I know everybody in the universe. Rose this. Turlough that. Ooh, I've met Queen Victoria. Well, aren't you special.”

He didn't say anything, just looked at her.

Donna put a hand to her head, taking a deep, shuddering breath. “Oh. Wilf. No, that's right, isn't it. Oh, God, I had it, and then I forgot again. I remember now. I think.”

He shut his eyes. “Donna – ” he began, but she cut him off.

“Never mind,” she said, giving him a mirthless smile. “I'm all right.”

***

For the thousandth time, the Doctor wondered if it had been worth it.

No sense thinking about that. What was done was done. He still didn't like to be reminded of what he'd been about to do to her.

It was Jack who'd stopped him from erasing her memory. Hurled him bodily across the console room, in fact. Jack had scooped her limp body up, over the Doctor's protests, carried her into the med bay, and barricaded the door. He hadn't let the Doctor in until he'd sworn on the names of a few dead gods that he'd try something else instead.

She didn't know that. Didn't need to. Jack had never spoken of it since, not to either of them. The Doctor was grateful for that much.

He'd never seen the man so angry.

 _But she'll die_ , the Doctor had pleaded through the door of the med bay.

_You don't know that._

_I'm pretty sure of it. And I know better than you do, Jack Harkness._

_Then she'll die,_ Jack had said. _There are worse things. If you know so much, Doctor, you ought to know you have no right to take her mind._

It had been such a long night.

 _You have to let me see her_ , he'd shouted. _You don't understand what's happening to her. I won't do it, I promise. Just let me in._

She had looked so close to death, lying on the examination table, her face distorted and bristling with electrodes. Donna. His Donna. He'd hardly recognized her.

She'd awoken several times, convulsing and retching a thin green bile. Once, horribly, she'd recited e to 7,298 digits in a high, metallic stutter before they could get her sedated again.

Jack had kept a fierce eye on the Doctor as he'd cradled Donna's head in his hands, searching her mind for native psychic defenses that he could bolster. Racing to stay one step ahead of the searing light that threatened to burn her alive. She was so strong. It was the only reason she'd survived the metacrisis at all.

It twisted his guts in a knot to imagine the pain she was in. And then he went deeper, and felt it himself.

When she was quiet at last, deep in a psychically-induced coma, the Doctor had slumped into a chair, spent. _She's as stable as she's going to be. Now all we can do is wait and see,_ he had said. _You were right, Jack. I'm so sorry._

_You called it like you saw it, Doctor._

_So did you._

_What you were doing to her – I know a thing or two about that,_ Jack had said.

***

The Doctor offered an elbow. “Shall we?”

Donna hooked her arm through his. “Beam me up, Scotty.” They touched their teleport bracelets.

Beside him, he felt Donna's warm presence vanish, and turned to see her disappear in a haze of light.

Suddenly alone in the pod, the Doctor joggled the teleport bracelet on his left wrist impatiently and pushed the button again. Nothing happened. Out came the sonic screwdriver, and he buzzed at the metal cuff, to no avail.

There was a small blinking light on it he hadn't noticed before.

“What the...” He tried a different frequency. It was deadlocked. “Oh, this is no good. Think. Think think think think think think think.”

Around the pod, more and more tiny lights were blinking on. Machinery clicked and whispered in the walls. He tried to unclasp the teleport bracelet with his right hand, wanting to get a closer look at it, but it was locked firmly around his wrist.

A long black metallic tentacle snaked down from the ceiling, seizing his cuffed wrist. He yelped in dismay, frantically sonicating the thing in an effort to short-circuit its power supply, and got a nasty electric shock for his pains. Three more like it came rippling out of the ceiling and floor, coiling around his free wrist and ankles. The sonic screwdriver fell clattering to the ground.

He figured it out even before the machine arms were quite finished lashing him to the great metal slab. Still too late, though.

He gazed out over the sapphire valley, cold and glittering under a billion stars, and wondered how many times he would have to die.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In Which Donna Devises an Ingenious Solution to their Dire Predicament, and the Doctor finds a Novel Application for a Bit of Obsolete Technology.
> 
> Last stop before the 7 pm express to Comedy Manpain Humiliation Fetish Town. (Population: Me.)

“Well, this is a fine mess,” said Donna.

She'd given up waiting for him back on the ship, and teleported back in to see what had become of him. Knowing him, he'd probably gotten sidetracked by an evil megalomaniac, or a kitten, or something.

He looked sodding ridiculous with his wrists cuffed alongside his head like that. Donna half expected to see some slinky alien with thigh-high boots and a riding crop pop out from behind the slab. She'd have taken another picture with her mobile, if their predicament hadn't been so dire.

They'd tried everything in their limited arsenal on the metal arms. Just like the Doctor not to have anything useful in those tremendous pockets of his. A yo-yo, bits of string, a couple of Möbius band-aids, some very linty jellybabies, a fleet of extremely tiny intergalactic warships that couldn't be seen with the naked eye. Rubbish.

She hadn't been able to teleport him out by grabbing onto him. And the _whowww_ noise the pod made when she teleported back in again didn't bode well. It sounded like a massive generator powering down for a second, and it made him think they probably didn't have too much juice left in the teleport link. Solar powered, most likely.

Jack hadn't been able to shed much light on their situation. By the time Donna called him, he'd managed to hack into the mainframe, and was more than happy to do a bit of blind mucking about, just to see if it would help.

Overwriting a random chunk of code destined for the teleport console got rapid results: the pod's life support systems began powering down. Jack had restored it in a hurry.

The Doctor made big sad eyes at Donna, morose as a wet cat. “I'm so glad you came back, if only to say goodbye,” he said.

“Oh, shut it, Martian. We'll get you out of this,” she said. “Your future self was in Cardiff before us, remember? So you've got to survive.”

“Doesn't quite work that way,” he said. “People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but actually from a non-linear, non-subjective...”

She'd heard it before. Several times. “Yes, I know, Spaceman. Timey-wimey, wibbly-wobbly,” she said. “You'd think you'd have at least had the decency to tell yourself not to use the teleporter.”

“Maybe it was on the back of the note. I didn't check the back,” he said. “ _Fahrfegnugen_. Should have done.”

“We'll think of something,” Donna said, hoping it was true. “You can't have lived nine hundred years and saved thousands of worlds from destruction only to be killed by a bloody sunburn. That's just ludicrous.”

“I don't see how we can prevent it.”

“Can't we just put our coats over our heads til we think of something?”

“If that were all it took to keep off x-tonic rays, there'd be Tescos all over this planet by now.” He screwed up his face, thinking, then suddenly brightened. “No. Yes. No. Oh, it would never work. Oh yes! That just might do it. Yes, yes, yes! Brilliant! Donna, I've got it!” he yelped triumphantly.

“What? What do we do?” she said, breathless.

“You've got to cut my ear off.”

“What?”

“Yes, that ought to do it. Or a toe. Oooh, that's horrible. What do you think, Donna? A toe or an ear? Oh, this isn't going to be any fun at all, is it. Which do you think is worse? Oh, toe's more painful, definitely. But I won't miss it as much in the end. Or would I?”

“Excuse me. Can you go back to the part where I have to _cut your bloody ear off,_ ” she said.

“Sure. You'll have to. Well, a fair bit of it, anyway. It's the only way. I can't do it myself.”

Donna gritted her teeth and made a massive effort to be patient. “Why. Do I have. To cut. Your sodding ear off,” she said. “Because it is thoroughly non-obvious to my rapidly expanding yet still depressingly finite intellect. _Doctor_.”

“Right. Sorry,” he said. “If I'm right – and I'm pretty sure I'm right – this whole contraption we're in now is basically just a piece of a bigger algorithm. You know those Rube Goldberg machines, where the mouse eats the cheese and the ball drops into the cup and the little seesaw thingamy goes _whee-er-eee-er.._.”

She made a hurry-it-up motion with her hand. He took a deep breath.

“Okay. So. This thing we're in, it's a piece in the middle of the Rube Goldberg machine. That last big cable we found, back on the ship? That's the next piece. There's masses of data being fed down here, terabytes upon terabytes every second, and just one teeny little squib of data coming out of the teleporter. Why do you suppose that is?”

She shrugged. “Enlighten me, Socrates.”

“Because the only thing whatever's on the other end of that cable needs to know is whether or not the mouse is in the trap. This whole thing is a trap, Donna. And not just any trap. It's a trap for me.”

Donna thought that was ridiculously self-absorbed of him, and attempted to say so, but he had that I Am Explaining Things look on his face and refused to be derailed.

“It let you out, and kept me here. Why? Because it was _built_ that way. It's designed to be triggered only by me. Waiting here for me, for who knows how long. And I've gone and taken the bait.” He furrowed his brow, thinking harder. “Or maybe it's a trap for a Time Lord. Hmm. That's more likely, I suppose. Though only just.”

“What could these mystery machine people possibly want you for?”

“To kill me, obviously. Oh, it's brilliant, it's completely automated, they don't have to be here, they don't even have to press a button.” He laughed, showing all of his teeth, his face beginning to look a little feverish. “Remember what I said about a controlled nuclear explosion? Do you know how much power there is in a biologically generated artronic field? They could run a ship that size for decades off me.”

Donna had a flash of _deja vu_ , a dim underwater memory of being flooded with golden light. “Ooh. Oh, that's downright evil. Clever, too.” She gave a little nod of appreciation, despite herself. It _was_ clever.

'But how could they have fixed it just for you?” she said.

“My genetic code. I'm sure of it. It's the only thing that makes sense. It's written right into the raw code that runs the ship's computer. The trap is set to go off when there's a match. Have a good look at the inside of your teleport bracelet, Donna. Fifty pounds says there's a genetic probe in there, all fixed up to communicate with the ship's mainframe.”

She unclasped the cuff. “Oh! Of all the...”

As she pulled the cuff off her wrist, a gleaming wire, thinner than an acupuncture needle and almost invisible, emerged from the flesh of her forearm. As she held the cuff at arm's length, it whipped back and forth, seeking living tissue to pierce.

“Ugh! How did I not notice that?” She made a face at the bracelet.

“You wouldn't, unless you were looking. Look how thin it is,” he said. “Don't worry. It's totally harmless. Except when it's part of a plot to trap you in a glass box on an x-tonic system and use your life force for battery juice.”

“So how did they get your genetic code in the first place?” she asked.

“It must be someone I've met before. Probably someone I've cheesed off. Well, that certainly narrows it down.” He laughed.

“And where does your ear come in?”

“That's the brilliant part,” he said, a genuine smile slowly creeping back across his face. “I've got a real-time genetic extrapolator back on the TARDIS. It's not too hard to run. Jack could run it.”

“Oi!” she shouted. “I could run it!”

“Right. Anyway --”

“Who fixed the bleeding microwave last week, then?”

“All right! You could run it.” He winced. “Anyway, we've got one. And your teleport bracelet is still working, thanks to you not being enough of a match for my genetic code, evidently. Good thing you're not a bit more Time Lord-y, Donna.”

“My sentiments exactly.”

“So all we've got to do is get a good-sized blob of living tissue -- my living tissue – back to the TARDIS, sequence my DNA, find the matching code, garble it up good and proper, and WHAM! Trap resets, teleport unlocks, and Bob's your uncle.” He beamed. Then, abruptly, he frowned again. “Too bad about my ear.”

“Could you regrow it?”

“No,” he sighed. “Unless you kill me first. Rather you didn't.”

“Can't you use your hair or something? Hasn't that got DNA?”

“Sure we could, if we had a lab full of enzymes and an extra few days to sit around amplifying and parsing the genetic sequence. The real-time extrapolator harnesses the organelles inside living cells to do most of the work of gene sequencing, and it's got to have a lot of them to work. The only living cells in hair are the teeny tiny bits right at the follicle. You'd have to basically scalp me to get enough.”

“What about blood?”

“No good. Time Lords and humans, we've both got erythrocytes with no nuclei. That means there's basically no DNA in red blood cells. White blood cells, sure. Just my luck not to have any raging infections.”

“So. Off with your ear, then, is it?” Donna folded her arms across her chest and glared.

“Er,” he said. What was it about that woman that was forever making him feel foolish? “Yes.”

“You can't think of anything else.”

“Not really, no.”

“Time Boy. Hello. ARE YOU THICK?”

He shot her his best arch, 'Excuse Me, My People Invented Time Travel' look. Spoiled a little by the fact that he was trussed up like a Christmas turkey.

“You can't think of any conceivable way to get DNA out of that skinny alien carcass of yours without lopping off bits? Do they not have shagging on Gallifrey?”

“Oh,” he said, turning crimson. “Well.” It actually hadn't occurred to him. God, he was thick.

“Well? Do they?”

“Yes. Yes they do. Did.” His face got a distant look.

“Well?” She was still glaring.

“Well what?”

“Well, what's it going to be? Ear or...” She cast a glance in the direction of his trousers. He blushed harder.

“Oh God, Donna, I simply cannot ask you to do that,” he said.

“Oh, because _cutting your bloody ear off_ is going to be so much more fun for me, then? Woo-hoo, exciting space adventures!” Donna paced back and forth across the pod, furious, head held high, eyes blazing

She was glorious, really.

“Well. Theoretically, it's possible.” He began thinking out loud again, momentarily distracted from their awkward predicament by the technical challenges of the situation.

“There'd be some genetic variation in the sample, sure, but that shouldn't be an issue. With millions of different sequences it ought to add up to a representative genome. Though the lifespan of the sample would be a problem. Er, depending. Whether or not you, um,” he trailed off, all at once acutely embarrassed at having to discuss bodily fluids with a human. “We couldn't just. I mean. We'd actually have to.”

“Doctor. What are you, twelve?” Rassilon, he wished she'd stop looking him right in the eye like that. “Have to what?”

“It won't live long enough outside your body,” he said, so fast she almost couldn't make out the words.

“Well, isn't that _wizard_ ,” she said, with heavy sarcasm. “Could we make it work, though? With the genetic extrapolator thingy, I mean.”

“If you – It's got a probe,” he said, wondering if it was possible to regenerate from shame.

She buried her face in her hands for a long moment, then spoke in a calm voice. “Doctor. Listen to me. I know you're an alien and all, and you have God knows what kind of weird ideas about these things. Just, please, know that I'm very fond of you, and I really do not want you to die here.”

He nodded.

“Nor do I want to have to look at your one-eared head for the rest of time and think, 'If only I'd just done the decent thing and shagged him, he'd still have two of those.' All right?”

“All right,” he said, swallowing hard.

“You don't really want to lose an ear, do you? Because if you'd rather.”

“No, I don't really. Unless you'd rather.”

“Enough with the chivalry, Doctor, I'm not cutting any of your bits off if I can help it, and that's final.” She flashed him a forced smile. “ _Allons-y_.”

***

Back on the ship, poring over code, Jack thought he heard – or maybe felt – a subtle shift in the hum of the core's machinery, as if a slug of power had been diverted to awaken something that had been dormant. He'd done time on enough spacecrafts to recognize the sound.

Jack's hand hovered over the pistol at his belt, and he listened for a long moment before turning his attention back to the task at hand. It was probably nothing. But in all his long years, he'd never gone wrong by being too paranoid.

***

With a little effort, Donna managed to arrange her coat across a panel of glowing circuit boards, cutting down a bit on the light inside the pod.

 _Thank God for that,_ she thought. Oh, he was easy enough on the eyes, in a sort of ferrety way. But that hardly mattered. It just wasn't supposed to _happen_ , that's all, and the sooner it happened, the sooner they could get on with the business of pretending it never had.

Lashed tight to the thick slab of pitted metal, tilted up to face that great round porthole, his angular form was half drowned in shadow. Still, she could swear he was actually trying to flatten himself against the slab. Shrinking away from her. It hurt her heart, and her pride. That absolute mollusk.

It made sense, though. Poor thing. Last of his kind and all. She must be disgusting to him. Like a green blob, with fifty slimy arms. Or not. Knowing him, that might be something he'd be more apt to go for.

Still, the least he could do was try not to be so bloody obvious about it.

“Spaceman.” She was exasperated, but her voice was gentle. “Are you off somewhere doing your times tables or what?”

“Sorry, sorry,” he groaned. “Oh Donna. Of all the things in all the worlds. I am just not quite prepared for this.”

For a long time now, it hadn't really occurred to him to wonder why he'd stopped bothering with sex. He had a roving eye, all right, and still swooned like a schoolgirl over lovely clever things, but the beast just didn't get its claws into him anymore.

He'd forgotten something. Something important. Or at least it had been, once. _Think_.

Donna folded her arms across her chest. “Sontaran Army, no problem. Five million homicidal Daleks, fine. Girl wants to get in your precious stripey trousers, you turn into a jelly.” She gave a helpless shrug, turning her palms up to him in a gesture of supplication. “You are the living end, Time Boy. God knows I've made some dodgy picks in the bloke department, but never one who'd rather cut his own _ear_ off than –”

The protests came tumbling out of his mouth at top speed before she was done talking. “Oh, no, no, Donna, it's not like – you're not – I mean, you're beautiful, you're absolutely, spectacularly beautiful. Like a blossoming Isolus sporophyte. Er, not that I've been thinking about you. In that way. I haven't. I would never, ever have – oh, God, that didn't sound right either, did it?”

She swallowed hard. This wasn't going to be easy. Well, neither was dragging Lance down the aisle, but she'd managed that – or would have. Donna Noble was never one to let her own wounded pride get in her way. Not when she had a job to do.

“Never mind about that.” she said. A horrible thought froze her blood. “You haven't got – oh, God, you haven't got some kind of special Time Lord – apparatus?”

“No no no no no no no,” he spluttered, blushing ferociously in the dark. “Nothing like that. Just like you. Well, not like _you_ , so to speak, but humans, you know, male humans. Like that. Well. More or less.”

She really wasn't going to dwell on what _more or less_ might mean.

“Well, then, I think I can manage.” She took a step forward, closer to the slab. The way it was tilted – it was going to be awkward. Not half as awkward as touching him, any part of him, while he just lay there looking at her with those dark silent eyes. “Just – just tell me what to do. It'll be all right. It will. Doctor, I promise it will.”

“Donna,” he said, and then couldn't finish the sentence, couldn't think what he meant to say. He felt an intense, neurotic urge to scratch the back of his neck, mess with his hair, rummage in his pockets, sonicate some electronic gewgaw across the room, something, anything. He could just barely reach his right earlobe. He settled for tugging on it.

She put a tentative hand on his lapel. “Doctor. Are you – I mean, have you – has it been a long time?”

“Oh, no. Not long at all,” he said. “About, let's see, two hundred years ago. On Earth. Last time I took a proper holiday. In the Caribbean, sometime in the nineteen-thirties, when it was still really pretty, before it got all steamrolled and high-rised and you all dumped a fat lot of poison into the sea.”

“TWO HUNDRED YEARS,” she shouted, setting off a flurry of electronic whickering and flashing of tiny green and red lights from the walls of the pod. “Doctor. You haven't had it off in two. Hundred. Years.”

“Ohhhhhh, you say that like it's not normal or something. I'll tell you what's not normal, Donna Noble, in the grand scheme of the universe. You lot. Shagging everything that makes you a cup of tea or gives you the time of day in the queue at the supermarket. Well, no. I didn't mean _you_ , specifically. Welllll. Not that it's your fault.”

He pried a little deeper into the memory that was surfacing. Trinidad. Of course. It was all coming back to him, now.

And as he remembered, it dawned on him that this was going to be a bit complicated.

“Donna, I've got to explain something,” he said.

She wasn't listening, not really. She was realizing, once she got done shouting, that she was relieved. He actually could have been a virgin. And he'd said “Earth.” Which meant a human. She hoped.

“So that's two hundred of your years, then? Earth years or Gallifrey? How do you know how old you are, anyway?” She'd never been entirely convinced by anything he had to say about his age.

“Oh, that's easy, just a few calculations based on the position in the spacetime matrix of your personal point of origin, the average periodicity of the satellites you've visited in your lifetime multiplied by the duration of your visits, a constant for your biorhythmic wavelength, just your basic temporal algebraic manipulation. Then you just convert to local units. It's simple. I'll show you how to do it when you get a bit smarter. We're wasting time.”

“Right,” she said. Deep breath. Now or never. She leaned in to kiss him. But he stopped her with yet another torrent of verbiage.

“Donna, wait. Donna. First just let me explain. It's not that simple. There's something that needs doing first.”

He tugged on his earlobe again. This was very private business. “The TARDIS. I'm connected to her. All the time. We're symbiotically linked. A long time ago – well, years ago, anyway – I built something. A sort of – shunt, like a circuit. It taps into our shared psionic current and conducts energy, from me, into a sort of – receptacle. Like a spare battery. And the energy it's using. It's my – it's – well, it's sort of a part of my brain, a part I wasn't using. Because it's not a part of the brain that's the least bit good for thinking with.”

There was a long silence in the pod.

“You left your mojo on your space ship,” Donna said flatly.

“Er. Yes.” His earlobe was getting sore. Maybe he'd better go back to Plan A, and just have her bite it off instead. Such nice ears this body had, though, not like the last one. Pity.

“So what do we do, Doctor?” she sighed.

He was a little fuzzy on standard human mating etiquette, but he thought for sure she wasn't going to like this part, not at all. “We've got to call Jack and get him to fix it.”

 

***

The device was so clever. He should have thought of it years before. There was probably some ethical objection to what he'd done to himself, he vaguely remembered having had one for a moment, but damned if he could dredge it up now.

It had been so long since the Doctor had been whole. Two lifetimes. He searched his mind, rifling through old memories. Someone else's memories, by now – and it wasn't just the usual fog surrounding events from before his current regeneration. (Nothing like a bit of light hypnotic suggestion to help keep the past in its proper place. He hadn't expected to need it again. Certainly not after the fall of Gallifrey.)

He remembered now, what had happened. He'd come back to Earth for awhile. Before the last days, before he'd known how it would end.

He'd been so tired, sick to death of endless grinding war, wanting to forget himself for awhile. The battle of the Horsehead Nebula had nearly undone him. He'd had a choice to make, a terrible choice, and he'd chosen Fitz. And then lost him anyway.

The islands had felt like a refuge. Washed up in Port of Spain like any other piece of driftwood, he'd left the TARDIS parked in a shipyard on a whim, and shipped out on a schooner working the little island ports.

It felt good to be somebody else's passenger, after all these years. A working passenger, at that. He spent the first few days like any green Jack Tar on his first trip out of the harbor: retching miserably over the rail. But he caught on quick. There was plenty to do.

He was careful to maintain the perception filter. A white man in a velvet frock coat, working the rigging on a Trinidadian schooner in 1932. People would talk.

It was three weeks before any man on the ship spoke a word to him. The sea had been calm for hours, and he'd been bored silly. He was amusing himself by stomping around the aft deck, mimicking the rolling gait of the ship's cook, a gangly blue-eyed Vincentian with a laugh like a dog barking.

A shadow fell across the Doctor's path. He looked up and met the gaze of its owner: a pair of piercing green eyes in a brown face.

“Don' try and mamaguy me,” the sailor said, and spat at the Doctor's feet. “Vincie ain't see you, but bitch, I do.” He turned away with a dismissive shrug.

It froze the Doctor's blood. No human had ever seen right through him like that.

He kept a respectful distance from the man after that.

Until the day a storm came boiling up out of the sea, no warning, just the livid sky and the water under the bowsprit suddenly alive with fish. Within a few breaths, the waves were taller than the foremast. Nothing he could do but haul sail alongside the terrified sailors, skittering across the slippery decks like dice across a craps table. He wondered what it would feel like to drown.

The green-eyed sailor and the cook, hauling line side by side, their backs hunching and straightening again, faster than two rats running through a drainpipe. “If we's to drong, we go drong, Vince, fock-it!”

All night, the sea and sky made war on the schooner, while the captain hunched fast to the wheel, grim as a barnacle. And at his side stood the sailor, possessed by some inhuman strength, feeding the captain white rum to keep him on his feet. Twelve hours they passed that way, til the dawn came in pink and gold over calm seas.

A man who could see through illusions, a man who would stay at his captain's side even through a storm that would claw the paint off a bowsprit. The Doctor could use a man like that on his own ship.

He found the sailor that evening, as the ship lay in Castries harbor. One of the few that hadn't headed straight for shore. He was sitting on a wooden crate with a needle and a thick waxy thread, mending a sail torn in the storm.

“Don't you want to know who I am?” he asked.

The man laughed. “You a sailor, else you be down five fathom by now,” he said.

“True enough,” the Doctor said.

“Shabine,” the man said, extending a callused hand.

“The Doctor,” he said, shaking it.

They'd talked for hours, passing a contraband bottle of Pusser's rum back and forth between them. Shabine had tales to rival the Doctor's, and a way of telling them that reminded the Doctor powerfully of a blind Greek storyteller he'd known once, long ago. A fleet of ghost ships rising up out of the mist before dawn, their pallid decks echoing with the shouts of slavers and the crack of the lash. A vision of God, or Leviathan, harpooned and bleeding, and singing to Shabine out of the dark water. Islands like stars, more than you could count, green Chacachacare and grim Nelson's Island and the rough brown tooth of Kick-'em-Jenny. But no harbor for Shabine, the wanderer.

The night rolled across the sky, and stars wheeled above the mast. They sang songs written by long-dead men; they wept for their homes, for their lost wives and children.

All through the wet season, and into the dry, the Doctor passed as a crewman on the schooner _Flight_ , unseen by anyone on board except Shabine. The two of them worked side by side most days, talking together. Shabine, who was fluent in Dutch, island patois and the Queen's English, and could curse memorably in French and Portuguese, was picking up Gallifreyan words at a rapid clip. For his part, the Doctor was learning how to be patient with old things. In this world, where your life depended on your skill with wood, cloth, and rope, the youngest sailor could outpace him.

It was a good place to hide out, for a Time Lord tired of listening to the universe tick. Like any place busy throwing off the shackles of history, the islands were boiling with possibility. Eddies of time swirled around the _Flight_ , raising the hairs on the back of the Doctor's neck, shifting quicker than the weather. Nothing was fixed in place. No disasters to avert. No one to save.

The crew began avoiding Shabine: a man with a mad light in his eye, who talked to himself and had dark moods, who would cut you if you mocked him.

One bright morning, the Doctor felt the weight of war lift off his shoulders and leave him light as a gull skimming over the water. Bare to the waist and sun-browned, high in the rigging, he looked out over the sea, the dim islands, a school of feeding dorado breaking the water off the port bow, and felt almost human.

That night, Shabine took him, roughly, after the way of sailors and prisoners everywhere. So unlike the Doctor, letting it happen this way. It didn't matter; everything was breaking. _Come with me_ , the Doctor said, in his own native tongue, _come away with me and I will show you every star in the sky._ But he got no answer, and when the other man cried out, it was with a woman's name on his lips.

In the morning, the Flight lay in harbor, but Shabine was gone. In the pocket of his frock coat, the Doctor found a ragged, salt-stained composition book. He flipped to any page.

 _As many islands as the stars at night_  
 _on that branched tree from which meteors are shaken_  
 _like falling fruit around the schooner_ Flight.  
 _But things must fall, and so it always was,_  
 _on one hand Venus, on the other Mars;_  
 _fall, and are one, just as this earth is one_  
 _island in archipelagoes of stars._

The Doctor left the _Flight_ without a backward glance. He knew what was surely waiting for him back on the TARDIS: death, dust, the cloister bell ringing and ringing for no one.

He began working on it immediately, half out of bleak curiosity, just to prove to himself that he could make it work. And once it was done, he didn't mind, not really. It was more a relief than anything. It didn't take as long as he'd expected, and it didn't hurt. Even in sentient species, some aspects of neurophysiology were almost pitifully simple.

He avoided the Earth a long time after that. Long enough that by the time he came back – a new man with a new face – there was no longer anything he wanted that he didn't have the will to walk away from.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In Which the Trusty Jack Harkness Proves Most Capable at Tech Support, the TARDIS Dances, and There is More to Donna Noble than Meets the Eye.

It took the Doctor a few minutes to convince Jack that he was serious.

“I don't know which I find more disturbing, Doctor: The fact that you built a gadget to drain off your fucking sex drive, or the fact that you haven't entrusted your loyal and devastatingly handsome co-pilot with this information before now,” Jack said.

“Around four o'clock, there's a trapdoor in the floor. Lift it up. There should be some crates and things down there.”

A brief silence. The creak of a hinge. Then a resounding crash. “Ow,” said Jack. “What's with all the copper tubing?”

“Sorry,” the Doctor said. “So sorry. Forgot about those. Do you see, there's some boxes with letters on them?”

“Sure, I see them.”

“You're looking for a key, maybe in a little box, or an envelope. I don't remember. Could be in P, for psionic shunt. Try that one.”

“Psionic starts with a P?”

“It's silent!”

“Seriously, do you not even know where the hell you put it? No wonder you're the only Time Lord left.”

“Oh, come on! It was two regenerations ago!”

“So you're a virgin twice in a row? Jesus, Doctor.”

In the interest of time, the Doctor decided to skip the indignant spluttering that comment would have elicited under ordinary circumstances. “What's in the P box?”

“Lot of bikinis, mostly.”

The Doctor shook his head, irritated. “Try S.”

“Oh, that's not obvious or anything,” Jack scoffed. “Let's see. What do we have here. Big skull helmety thing, very camp looking. Obviously not. Some kind of leathery eggshell, nope. Book sort of thing, could be it – ooh, Doctor, I didn't know you wrote _pooooetry_. Aha! An envelope! Nope, it's full of Polaroids. Hey, Sarah-Jane, nice boots, girl.”

“No. I know where it is. It's in R. I remember, now.”

Donna gave him a pointed look. “R for Rose?”

“R for reverse-fed psionic shunt!” he squawked.

“Quit squabbling, you two lovebirds, we don't have all night,” Jack said. “This could be it -- shit, just a letter. Who the hell writes you fruity letters in French? Ooh, what have we got here? Some kind of wall calendar. 'Busty She-Devils of Raxicoricofallipatorius.' Oh my. _Doctor_.”

“Fifteenth month,” he said, blushing. He heard pages flipping. Jack let out an appreciative whistle.

“Nice one,” said Jack. “There's a little envelope taped to the page. That's got to be it. Oh yes, here we go.”

“Found the key?”

“I did. Couldn't be more ordinary-looking. You do know a regular Yale pin tumbler lock isn't exactly the last word in securing top secret alien technology, right, Doctor?”

“I thought the Raxicoricofallipatorians would scare off nosy-parkerers. Obviously not ones named Jack Harkness,” he said. “Now, underneath the main console, around seven o'clock, there's a piece of grating that comes up if you unlock it. Don't bother looking, it's got a perception filter on it. You'll find it quicker if you use your hands.”

“That's what they all say,” said Jack. “Oh, _hello_ , there. You've got quite the apparatus down here, Doctor.”

“Be careful, it's wired directly into the TARDIS's main bioenergetic feed. Don't joggle it,” said the Doctor. “See the screen? That's the interface. Go ahead and switch it on. There should be a sort of handheld thing nearby, with buttons.”

“You mean this old Nintendo controller? Seriously?”

“That's it. It's pretty simple. Buttons are for toggling between the shunt and the linked bioenergetic pathway, and you use the arrows to navigate through two-dimensional space.”

“So which one is you? Oh. Obviously,” said Jack, switching from a Technicolor fusillade of light to a black screen with faint grid lines, empty except for a bright flicker near the lower left-hand corner. “Oh, that's cute. Doctor, you've got a pilot light.”

“I'm not entirely an amoeba,” he said, sounding defensive.

“Never thought you were,” said Jack. “All right, here goes. Hang on, Doctor, we're going for a ride.”

“Jack – don't turn it up all at once, it'll overwhelm my nervous system,” said the Doctor. “Give it a little on the x-axis, then a little on the y-axis, and so on. It ought to take at least ten minutes or so before most of the current is flowing normally again.”

“Talk dirty to me,” said Jack. “Don't worry, you're in good hands.”

“Oh, and Jack?”

“Yes?”

“As soon as you're done with the genetic sequencing, I want you to redirect the current back into the shunt again. I can't be sure I'll be in the right state of mind to do it myself.”

Jack let out a bark of laughter so sharp it made the TARDIS jump.

“Sir, yes, sir,” said Jack. “Put Donna on.”

The Doctor handed her the phone.

“What do you want, Jack?”

“Running commentary, what else?”

“Hanging up now!”

“That's a very complicated piece of engineering we're dealing with, Donna. You might need tech support.”

“Hanging UP, Jack! Goodbye!”

 

***

Jack uttered a colorful oath at his mobile and shoved it into his trouser pocket, feeling a bit like the victim of an elaborate practical joke.

“I wouldn't put it past him,” he announced to the TARDIS's central column. “You're not taking video, are you?”

He couldn't hear her, naturally, but he'd gotten into the habit of talking to her anyway. At least when the Doctor wasn't around.

He rearranged his position in the tiny crawlspace under the grating. It was cramped, but there was just room enough for him to sit comfortably with his back against a trunk of coral, knees to his chest, facing the little screen. The device itself, which looked absurdly complicated, took up most of the crawlspace. He would've liked to get a better look at it, but surely now was not a good time to start tinkering with it. 

“For the record, Doctor, this is completely ridiculous,” he said, picking up the small handheld controller. He pressed a few buttons, and watched as a small flame of light flicked out briefly from the origin point on the screen. He checked his watch.

“I hope you're enjoying this,” he said, pressing and holding the y-axis arrow for a moment, while the screen convulsed in a disorganized spasm of light. Probably a bit too much, there. He eased back on the arrow, and let a bit more energy into the horizontal axis.

With a little more experimenting with the buttons, Jack settled into a pattern that seemed to work nicely. The flickering light began spreading across the screen, pulsing and contracting in a complicated rhythm.

“Huh. Double heartbeat,” Jack muttered. It was mesmerizing. And, increasingly, not at all ridiculous.

There weren't any obvious security cameras around. Jack couldn't be sure. But after a few more minutes, he decided he didn't give a damn.

***

The TARDIS was not infinite, but she was vast beyond imagining. All times were now to her, all wheres were here, except at her most vulnerable organs: the thin plasmic shell through which she opened to the world, and the living threads that bound her to her pilot. Here, the joyous flood of time was squeezed to a trickle.

She felt the connection between her and her Time Lord twist briefly, and for an instant all of her awareness hovered on him, the dark energy of a million stars shrunk down to a dancing point between his eyes. But the bond remained secure, and so she stretched out again, tasting the dust at the edges of the universe.

Close in time and space to him, another signal was demanding her notice: the grating voice of the ship that now contained her, like the eyepiece of a telescope contains a distant galaxy.

It hailed her in a strange, malformed language. She bent more of her attention on the ship, fastening tendrils of intelligence onto the stuttering signal, and a pattern emerged. Crude and broken, babbling its own operating commands as it sought to forge a connection to her, the ship spoke.  
 _  
query condition if condition equals true initiate communication protocol else repeat_

_communication protocol initiated_

_time and relative dimension in space type 40 mark i ping over_

She blazed, haughty, and announced her Self in terms simple enough for her crude supplicant to understand.

_I AM_

The ship stuttered again.  
 _  
If ping successful initiate anchor sequence else initiate communication protocol_

_anchor sequence initiated_

_mark i request basecode over_

The TARDIS glowed and hummed, golden threads swirling around her molten core.

_PROVE THAT YOU ARE WORTHY_

The ship began to chant, a rhythmic concatenation of numbers, harmonizing with the TARDIS's own fierce music. The TARDIS whirled in place, rejoicing, and joined in the chant, calling and responding as the sequence built to an ecstatic crescendo.

She stretched living chronic roots into the space beyond the exterior walls of her plasmic shell, millions of root-hairs grappling onto the warp and weft of time and space, binding herself to her rough acolyte.  
 _  
WE ARE ONE_ , she thrummed, satisfied.

The ship merely crackled and hissed, its work done.

***

Donna clicked the mobile closed and put it into the pocket of her coat.

“How much time do we have?” she asked.

“About three hours before sunrise, I think.” He studied the sky, now spilling milky light through the great lens. “That half-moon just on the horizon, that's Midnight's fifth moon rising. You'll need at least an hour to run the extrapolation, and then you'll have to overwrite the gene sequences in the software algorithm. Jack's got a running start on that already by hacking into the mainframe, but it's going to be close.”

He cleared his throat. “Anyway, even the background radiation here isn't very good for you. We probably ought to hurry.”

“All right,” she said, taking off her shoes and placing them neatly in a pair. She turned back to the Doctor, and placed one stockinged foot on the thick metal coil around his right ankle, pulling herself up and balancing on her toes.

She half-stood, half-lay, awkwardly pressed against his right side. “This thing really ought to have a recline button,” she said, patting the slab.

“Too bad about all these sonic dampers,” he said. “I think we're stuck like this.”

She made herself as comfortable as she could, nestling her cheek against his bony shoulder. “Is it working?” she asked, anxious.

He thought of at least three jokes he could crack at this juncture, decided against it. “Not yet. Give me a few minutes. It will.”

“I could use a few minutes, too,” she said. “I can't just –”

“I know.”

“I know we're in a hurry --”

He closed his eyes. He realized he was focusing on taking long, even breaths, as though his breathing might get away from him. “Donna. If you want me to, I can make sure this isn't --”  He shook his head sharply, gritting his teeth. He felt like a predator. “That you enjoy this. That you want it.”

“You mean, in my mind? You can control my mind?” she said.

“Yes,” he said. “If you want me to. Only if you want me to.”

“No,” she said. “Don't you dare. I have had quite enough of that kind of thing, thank you. Promise you won't.”

He nodded. A relief, really. He hadn't much relished the prospect of a cold, calculating probe of her brain's reward center.

She cupped his face with her free hand, fingertips sinking into his hair, and kissed his forehead. “We've been through a lot together, Doctor. We can bloody well get through this.”

“Mmmm,” he said, by way of agreement, trying and failing to scratch a pernicious itch on the top of his scalp.

To her own surprise, Donna was breathing a little harder. It had been a long time for her, too – not two hundred years, for the love of God, but long enough for her body to be a little bit grateful for the attention.

She pressed closer to him, wondering what sort of small talk one ought to make in this situation. “Anything I should know?” she murmured, her voice low and close to his ear. “I mean, about you lot. Time Lords. Is it different for you?”

“Oh, definitely,” he said.

“Well, that's helpful,” Donna rolled her eyes. “I mean it. Anything Time Lordy I should be doing?”

 _Yes. Yes, and you can't, and that's over for me now._ He kept his voice cheerful, giving nothing away. “Don't worry about that, really, it doesn't matter. This is so far outside the realm of normal Gallifreyan mating behavior it just isn't relevant.”

“Really?” Now she was intrigued. “So what _is_ normal Gallifreyan mating behavior?”

Oh dear. Where to begin, really? “Well. There's loads of formalities involved, for one thing,” he said. Formalities he'd never been one for observing, he didn't add. “It wouldn't just, you know, _happen_ like this. Certainly not at your age,” he said.

Donna reared back. “I. Beg. Your. Pardon,” she huffed.

“Too young! You're much too young. I'd be arrested,” he said, palms out in an ineffectual effort to ward off a potential slap in the face.

She settled back onto his shoulder, mollified. “Oh. All right then,” she said. “So how old were you your first time, old man, a hundred and two?”

“Not exactly. I was a bit precocious,” he said, smirking a little.

“I don't doubt it. Had a thing for blondes, I expect,” she teased.

“He certainly did,” the Doctor muttered.

She raised a quizzical eyebrow at him. He looked back at her, a half-smile on his lips, eyes dark and sober.

“Enough stalling, you demented thing,” she said, and kissed his mouth.

The taste of her was new but a little familiar. _Bit of a vitamin D deficiency_ , he thought, _must bring her somewhere sunny when we get out of here. If we get out of – oh._

Just a twinge. It was delicious, despite everything. He inhaled deeply.

“It's all right,” she said, running her hand through his hair and trailing her fingers along the back of his neck. “I've got you. I won't rush you. Just tell me, Doctor. Tell me what feels good.”

He turned his head away from her. “That,” he said, biting his lower lip.

She dug her nails into the nape of his neck, and he let out a long, shuddering sigh. His hands clenched on the air and opened again.

Donna ran her right foot along the Doctor's left trouser leg, looking for purchase. With her toes, she found a segment of the thick metal coil twined around his left ankle, and shifted her weight so she lay against him, chest to chest. He tensed like a greyhound under her, eyes squeezed shut, excruciatingly aware that his body was already beginning to betray him.

She molded her body against his, seeking warmth and comfort and finding none. There was something terribly clinical about it, even with his breath now ragged in her ear and his erection growing against her thigh, and she wished he had even one arm free to hold her with. His face was closed and remote.

Donna pressed her face into his throat, twining the fingers of one hand through his, the other hand still stroking the nape of his neck. “All right, it's all right,” she whispered, not sure which of the two of them she was reassuring. He turned his head to bury his face in her hair, eyes still shut.

His body was a mask she couldn't see beneath, and she reached for his face with both hands, kissing his throat and his mouth again and again, suddenly flooded with the desire to see him disheveled and undone.

The air near his skin was heavy with ozone. She breathed him in, felt him in the darkness around her, flexed a muscle she didn't know she had.

His eyes flew open. “ _Donna_ ,” he said.

“Oh! There. There you are,” she said, her voice breaking. She tried it again, unfurling toward him, reaching out to him, pulling him closer – gently at first, then insistent, tugging.

“You're – you shouldn't – oh, God,” he groaned, as she pressed her hands to his temples and reached further, deeper.

He'd been steeling himself for the peculiar human sexual response. The way they went through the motions, with great enthusiasm, but without seeming to feel anything on a psionic level – it had frightened him, the first time. It hadn't gone well. He'd learned enough about them since then to blush at the novice mistakes he'd made, but he'd never quite gotten used to it.

And then she'd touched him – fumbling, eager – in the last place he expected. After so many years. It set his body ringing like a tuning fork.  
   
“I feel you,” she breathed. It hurt a little, sweetly, a pure hot ache that flared in time with her heartbeat. He was stirring in the darkness, not just under her, but all around her, golden filaments that arched up and sang under her touch. _I'm doing this with my flipping mind_ , she thought, and instantly it was gone.

“It's – it's not like that,” he said. In the half-darkness, he was gravely beautiful, his sharp  features seeming almost lit from within. How had she not seen it before? “You don't move your arm by thinking, 'Brain, move my arm now.' You just move it.”

She relaxed a little, stroking his temple with her thumb and smoothing down a wayward strand of hair, and there, there it was again, growing in her like a little flame igniting a pile of tinder. Every time he breathed, she felt his narrow chest rise and fall a little under her, the tiny movements of his body blurring with the intense, palpable sensation of contact she was feeling now for the first time.

She tried it again, reaching out toward him – a little clumsy, and shy now that he was watching her so closely. But he felt warm and alive, and she pushed and pulled back again, sank into him, coiled around him, tasted him at the back of her throat.

“Is this all right?” she whispered, hoping.

“More than all right,” he said. “I didn't think you could – oh, that's – please, please don't push yourself too hard, Donna.”

She kissed him roughly, moaning into his mouth as he began to move with her, a slow rocking rhythm that sent pulses of heat spreading outward from her chest. She pushed back against it, and felt the slow rhythm intensify, each pulse detonating in the center of her with a deep percussive thud. _Harder. God, yes. This._

“Wait,” he said, gasping. “This isn't – it's amazing, but it's not going to help.”

Right. That. It felt so good, she'd practically forgotten. She looked down at him, still rocking into her, and was startled to see that he wasn't physically moving at all. But his eyes were open now, wide and dark and locked on hers, and oh, shit, he was _there_ , completely, hungry and brimming over with life.

Still pressing one hand to his face, desperate to keep contact, she tugged his shirt out of the waistband of his trousers. She snaked her free hand under his shirt and held him for a long moment, pressing her palm against the cool skin of his back.

He muttered something incomprehensible in her ear, his voice low and throaty and urgent. “Doctor,” she said, “English. Please.” He shook his head, a quick hard 'no,' and kept it up, a molten stream of vowels that found a target somewhere deep in Donna's vital organs even though she couldn't make out a word of it.

She drew her hand from his back around to his chest, making him shudder, and then ran it slowly down his belly, feeling the muscles twitch under his skin. She shifted her weight to one side again, making room between their bodies to reach down and gently begin stroking his cock – God, he was so hard she could almost feel his pulse through his trousers. He made a choking sound, and Donna pressed the thumb of her other hand harder into his temple, her own pulse hammering in her ears.

She did need both hands, though, and with a low moan, she broke away from him. Weak in the knees, she stepped down from the slab and awkwardly pulled her knickers and stockings down from under her dress.

“Shit, Doctor, you should see what you've done to me, here. You could sail a flipping boat on that,” she wisecracked, voice shaking.

In lieu of a sensible answer, he let out what she could only assume was a long stream of Gallifreyan profanity.

Donna unfastened his trousers, gently freeing him and easing his clothing down over his hips. Here was familiar ground, at least. Not five minutes ago, she'd been afraid she wouldn't be able to go through with it. And here he was, straining towards her, like any other man she'd ever taken to bed, homely and ridiculous and utterly lovely.

“I need you inside me,” she said, pulling herself up onto him again, nuzzling his throat.

“Humans. You love stating the obvious,” he said, his voice shooting for an even, matter-of-fact tone and missing by a country mile.

“Please. You love hearing it,” she said, drawing one knee up alongside him, balancing precariously on her other foot and clinging to him for support. She wrapped her hand loosely around his cock, guiding him inside her, savoring the little noises he made in the back of his throat as she slid down onto him. It was awkward – she could hardly move – but he felt _good_ , solid and real, inside her and under her.

“There,” she said, reaching to cup his face. “Can we do both at once?”

“Don't fall,” he said.

She almost did anyway.

***

It was over much too soon. No time. _Never enough time_ , he thought.

He was reasonably presentable. Trousers on, jacket buttoned, ready to face likely death with a modicum of dignity. Donna adjusted his tie, retrieved the screwdriver from the floor and tucked it into his pocket, and pressed the mobile into his right hand.

“There. Sorted,” she said. “I'll call when it's done. Or if we need you. But we should save the battery.”

“Right you are,” he said, looking grim and inscrutable. This plan, which had been so brilliant not long ago, suddenly seemed like a very long shot indeed.

“Can you reach the teleport button?”

He wiggled his left wrist. There was enough play in the metal bond to mash the button against the coil. It would do.

“In case we don't meet again, Doctor,” she said, thumb poised over her own teleport bracelet. “You know I love you.”

“Donna,” he said, but she hadn't waited, she was already gone.

The ghostly Cheshire-cat afterimage of her hung for a long time before him in the darkness.

***

The man in the cryo capsule woke up shrieking. The syringe full of adrenaline had kicked in before he was fully conscious. He panicked, then remembered where he was.

It was time. Time! His heart thudded painfully in his chest. He breathed deeply, trying to control his frantic heartbeat, and pushed the lid of the capsule open.

It wasn't far to the receptor bay, just a few meters. And he could rest there, until the sun came up. But he'd have to crawl. There was no way of knowing how long he'd been asleep, not until he could reach the computer, but it felt like centuries. His legs wouldn't move.

He groped in the dark to slide open the panel set into the wall of the capsule: a torch, water, and a packet of biscuits to fight the post-cryo nausea. His mouth was dry, but he forced himself to eat a biscuit, knowing he'd regret it later if he didn't choke it down.

It took him what felt like an eternity to reach the receptor bay. With shaky hands, he buckled himself into the chair, and pulled the lever that moved the entire apparatus into position over the great glass lens set into the belly of the ship. Far below him, the dark bulk of Midnight cut a round black hole in a riot of stars, with a shaving-thin crescent of light at the edge.

So soon now. The adrenaline was giving way to relief.

***

If in the black depths of Captain Jack Harkness's immortal soul there lurked an iota of jealousy for Donna, it evaporated as soon as she walked in the door.

It wasn't anything she said. Donna wasn't one for dramatics. Just something about the set of her jaw. He hoped she was all right. He figured if he asked, she'd probably hit him.

“So, how was it?” He leaned back in his chair at the console and flashed her the trademark Harkness grin.

“Better than your wildest dreams, Captain Fruitcake,” she snapped, without any real meanness. “Thanks for the backup.”

“It worked, then.” He still didn't quite believe it. Any of it.

Donna snorted. “Do you want a flipping _diagram_? Yes. It worked. Mission Bloody Accomplished. Where the _hell_ is the extrapolator, we haven't got all night here.”

“It's portable, it's designed for taking samples in the field. I set it up in your room. Though if you want help, we can move it to the med bay.” She gave him a pointed look at the word “help,” but for once there was no smirking on his face or in his voice.

“C'mon, I'll show you how it works.” He got to his feet and started down the hall to Donna's room.

It wasn't too awful. It didn't even look very science fiction, more like a kitchen appliance, and had a stapled-together little paper instruction booklet to match. She could've concocted a more formidable alien probe out of equipment from her third form biology lab.

“I sampled the philodendron, just to make sure it was running okay,” Jack said. The probe, connected to the extrapolator with a short cable, was submerged in what looked like (and, in fact, was) a teacup full of thoroughly blended houseplant.

“Well? Is it?”

“Looks like it,” he shrugged. “I tell you what – I'll just reset it for you, and you can yell if you need anything, okay? The sequence gets saved to this data drive, here. It's supposed to beep when it's done.”

“Fine by me,” she said. “Isn't it going to extrapolate me, too?”

“Yeah, probably,” said Jack. “Doesn't matter. We don't need it to be pure, we just need to make sure we get any four-letter sequence patterns that match. Assuming this crackpot theory of his is right, and the ship really has got his genetic code embedded in its operating software.”

“And then, what, you get the TARDIS to check this business against the code from the ship?”

“Exactly,” he said. “Starting with the portion that's running the teleporter. There's a lot of code there, and not a lot of time, so we've got to be strategic. I'm going to overwrite any long piece of code that matches with a piece from our houseplant friend, here. Just in case deleting it outright triggers some kind of booby trap.”

“Great. More things to worry about,” she said. “This is absolutely, without a doubt, _the_ most bonkers escape plan he's ever come up with.”

“That it is,” Jack said.

“Well, off you go, then, I can manage,” she said. “Put the kettle on while you're at it. I could murder a cup of tea.”


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In Which Jack Knows Best, A Debt Is Paid, and Chickens Come Home to Roost.

The first rays of the poisoned sun were just breaking over the glittering wasteland of Midnight's eastern hemisphere, piercing the capsule that bristled like a black sea urchin on the rocks below.

Jack stared at the screen in front of him, one hand rubbing the back of his neck. Until a few minutes ago he'd been coding so hard he was actually sweating. He'd been shocked when the first match had been found: a strand several hundred base pairs long, much too long to be a coincidence. The euphoria of discovery was quickly eclipsed by raw terror, as the computer began to spit out hundreds more matches.

He hadn't had time to hack them all. He hoped he'd gotten enough.

Standing beside him at the console, Donna clutched Jack's mobile in a white-knuckled grip. The Doctor had been alive on the phone a minute ago, until the call had cut out. Maybe it was just interference from the teleporter. In her mind, his body was becoming a column of fire, dissolving into pure energy and lashing out in a spasm of light to burn among the stars.

Neither she nor Jack breathed as a long minute passed. Either way, they would know soon.

The TARDIS door flew open, and he staggered in.

“Thank God!” said Donna. Her eyes shone, but she didn't move from where she stood.

Jack bounded across the room and wrapped his arms around the Doctor, who patted his back in a distracted sort of way. Jack stepped back and snapped his right hand up in a rakish salute.

“Welcome back, Doctor,” he said. “I don't know what we'd do without you.”

The Doctor sagged into the chair vacated by Jack, looking wrecked. “Yes. Well. Good work, you two.”

He looked at Donna, and heard her heart rate increase as she met his gaze. The intensity of it made the Doctor want to curl up in a corner and hide. The two of them, standing so close, all their obvious love and concern for him naked on their faces. They were so much more than he deserved.  
 _  
Run. Run far away from here, never come back_. He punched a string of numbers into the keyboard, picked up a mallet, and gave a half-hearted thwack at something on the console. Sparks flew from the grating. The TARDIS groaned and gave a few nausea-inducing lurches. He yelped in dismay and banged a fist on the console.

“Is it too much to ask to want to go somewhere else in the universe at this point? Somewhere that doesn't have a giant x-tonic sun trying to fry us all into crispy little bits?” He glared at the time rotor.

The TARDIS must have answered, because he sat looking attentive for a minute, then let out an exasperated sigh.

“We're stuck,” he said. “Jack, how many code matches did you find?”

“Thousands,” he said. “I think I got most of the ones in the operating code for the teleporter, but there's lots more.”

“That explains it, I think,” he said. “We've got to overwrite all of it before we can go anywhere. That ship is stalking us. The doorlocks are all equipped with bioscanners, I don't know why I didn't notice before. And there's some kind of lock on the TARDIS's temporal propulsion system.”

“No problem,” said Jack. “Now that we've got the sequences, it's not hard to do, it just takes time.”

The Doctor grimaced. “I suppose it's not the worst thing in the world. The ship could fall into the sun and we'd be safe in here,” he said. “How much longer will it take, do you think?”

“Couple hours, I'm guessing. I'll get cracking on it,” said Jack.

“Good,” said the Doctor. “Nobody goes out that door til we're clear of this whole system. Nobody. Not for any reason.”

No one protested.

The Doctor planted one foot on the console, extracted the sonic screwdriver from his jacket, and began noisily checking frequencies.

“Doing anything useful there, Doctor?” said Jack.

He muttered something inaudible, compulsively checking the propulsion system, the fuel jets, the settings on the air conditioner. Not being able to tinker with anything in the pod had been worse than being bound; it was like being blind. What was the best way to disable a sonic damper? He'd have to start carrying some extra tools.

Donna took a step toward the console. The two of them were absorbed: Jack bent over the computer, the Doctor clearly having an especially OCD moment with his precious toy. Infuriating.

“Hello? Doctor? Anybody home?”

The Doctor whirled around to face her, suddenly stern, tucking the screwdriver away in one swift motion. “Donna.”

Donna met his eyes and didn't look away. _The brass of him, that idiotic space-lizard, that great gormless Gallifreyan cephalopod. No “That was brilliant”? No “Are you all right, luv?” No “Thank you, Donna, for saving my life in such a spectacularly orgasmic manner”?_

He had a fierce look in his eyes – it looked like anger, but she knew him well enough to know it was probably closer to panic. “I want to see you in the Zero Room. Down the hall, first left, squiggly little staircase, past the carnivorous plants, third door on the right, mind the gap. I'll be there in a minute.”

She'd startled him from his ritualistic checking and rechecking. The TARDIS could wait. They were safe now. He should have had a look at Donna as soon as he'd walked in the door.

She drew herself up to her full height. “Oi! Feeling a little bossier now, Time Boy?” she roared, furious.

“Donna, I'm serious. Zero Room. Now.” He'd never liked the med bay much. Since the metacrisis, he hadn't so much as set foot in it, and he didn't plan on it unless it was absolutely necessary.

“Don't you boss me, skinny man. Now that you're alive, I am _going_ to take a _shower_. And you are going to _wait_.”

“A quick one,” he said, looking uncomfortable. She turned on her heel and stalked out of the console room.

Jack chuckled, but when the Doctor caught him at it, he was suddenly very busy with the computer.

The Doctor glared at Jack. “You didn't reset it. Did you?”

Jack feigned a look of offended innocence. “What, the extrapolator? Ask Donna, she had it last.”

“The psionic shunt. You left it off. I was very clear on that point.”

“Are you sure? How can you tell?” Jack looked him up and down, grinning. Neither of them spoke for a long moment.

The Doctor's mouth twitched. It wasn't exactly a smile. But it was good enough for Jack, who beamed. “I couldn't do it, Doctor. I can't believe you'd have something so goddamn beautiful locked away in a cupboard powering a backup generator, it's a fucking crime.”

“Well. Right. I'll have that key back, thanks.”

Jack shrugged and fished it out of his pocket. “Suit yourself.”

“Jack.”

Jack turned toward him, raising an eyebrow.

An odd expression flickered across the Doctor's face for a moment. He looked as if he were about to say something, but just blinked and nodded, got up and headed for the door.

“You're welcome,” said Jack.

 

***

Deep in the underbelly of the ship, the man strapped into the great chair was breathing easier now. Midnight was suspended below him, the eastern horizon beginning to glow blue with the light of the rising sun.

Everything was ready. To his right side, a touchscreen was duct-taped to a support post. He tapped at it, and music began to swell inside the receptor bay. He closed his eyes.

Now. _Now_.

Nothing.

It was much too far to the planet's surface for him to make out the tiny pod with his unaided eye. Still, he knew, it should be happening by now. Why was nothing happening? Biting his lip, fighting a dark tide of panic, he grasped again for the touchscreen anchored beside him. He poked a long, pale finger at it until he found what he wanted: the video feed from inside the pod.

Empty. _Empty_. No light. No Doctor.

But the signal had come. He had been awakened. It made no sense. He jabbed at the screen, scrolling backwards through the video feed to the moment when the signal had awakened him. He saw his prey, pinned like an insect, struggling uselessly against the bonds. It had worked, just as he thought it would. Where was he now? How could he have escaped?

The feed played on a little further, and he saw Donna. His mind went very quiet.

And then he knew. It hit him all at once, like a fist in the gut, exactly how he'd been foiled. He smashed at the screen, howling with fury.

Thirty years in the cold black of space, excruciatingly awake, without so much as a voice to talk to. All wasted, all for nothing. He would probably die here.

After a long time, he stopped screaming. All the anger drained out of him, left him cold and tired and lonelier than he'd been in all those long dark years. He pulled a lever, and began to unbuckle the straps of his chair. Below him, Midnight was a dazzling sapphire in the morning light.

They should still be on board. That, at least, was something.

If not – well, there was still one road he could take, if not home, at least to a time and place he'd been fond of all his life. And if it killed him, it would be quick.

He reached into his pocket, compulsively, and touched the cool metal object that was the last of his rapidly diminishing options. A teleport bracelet, fused in unholy mechanical union with the stripped-out core of his dying vortex manipulator.

It meant failure. He hadn't accepted that yet.

***

By the time she finished drying her hair, Donna wasn't quite so angry. She'd stopped expecting him to behave like a human being long ago. Why would he start now? Feeling a bit less prickly, she put on a thick, nearly ankle-length terry-cloth bathrobe and headed for the Zero Room.

Like everything else on the TARDIS had been so far, it wasn't quite what she was expecting. The room was very plain, with no furnishings to speak of, apart from a low sort of mat on which the Doctor was sitting cross-legged, waiting.

When Donna saw what he was holding out to her, she laughed.

“Ginger beer? You trying to take advantage of me, Doctor?” She seized the bottle and took a long swig.

“Whaaat? It's very restorative,” he protested. He studied her face. “How do you feel?”

“I feel fine. Fantastic,” she said, setting the bottle on the floor and sitting down beside him, tucking her bare feet under her. She pulled the sash of her bathrobe tighter around her waist. “Is this your room?”

“No. It's a room built to be safe. You've been here before, when – you probably don't remember. Safest spot in the Universe, right where you're sitting.”

“I suppose that means Jack can't get in, then,” she grinned.

He didn't smile. “Donna. Your head feels all right? You aren't seeing any blue glowy crystally sort of things in your peripheral vision, are you?” He pulled a small opthalmoscope out of his pocket and peered into her eye.

She put one finger over the eyepiece. “What, do you think you can shag me to _death_? I am _fine_ ,” she said. “Though if you want to give it a go --”

A tiny smile began in the corner of his mouth, then spread into a face-cracking grin. He clutched a fistful of his hair, looking more like a gawky graduate student than an ancient wanderer among the stars.

“You have got a room on this ship, haven't you?” After all this time on the TARDIS, she still didn't know if he even slept. She'd never caught him at it.

“Yes. Really, you don't want to go in there.” He turned her face this way and that, checking her pupils to be sure they were the same size.

“Why, what have you got, more pervy space magazines?” she teased.

“Nothing so exciting. A bed. And a lot of shoes. That's pretty much it. It's rather boarding-school, I'm afraid.”

“Oh, that could work,” she said.

“Donna,” he said. “Would you mind if I – I've got to have a look at you, to see if – ooh, this is a little awkward now, isn't it?” He mussed his hair again, needing something to do with his hands.

Her face fell. “It doesn't have to be,” she said, no longer teasing.

He didn't answer. A small muscle in his throat tensed.

She reached for his hands and held them tightly. “Look, Doctor, I'm just going to be blunt with you, OK? Because I don't know how else to be,” she said. “We never in a million years meant to end up in bed. Well, not in bed. You know what I mean.”

She stroked the palm of his hand with her thumb. “But we did. And I can still feel it.”

He sat absolutely still, listening. She went on.

“If you're done with that now, that's all right. I'm going to be sad about it awhile, but it's all right. I just need to know, Doctor. You have to tell me. That's what people _do_ ,” she said. “Or they should, anyway.”

He just looked at her.

She dropped his hands. “I know, you're not people,” she huffed.

“No,” he said.

She turned her head away from him, eyes stinging. Goddamn it. There wasn't even anything else in the room to pretend to look at.

“No, I'm not done with that,” he said.

She froze, not daring to move, like he was a wild animal she might frighten away.

“I don't know if it's safe,” he said.

Donna took a deep breath. _Safe_ _?_

“What you did back there. That's new. I need to know if you're all right,” he said.

“Oh, for Chrissake.” Donna made her hands into fists, digging her nails into her palms. How long were they going to keep treating her like a bloody invalid? Jack was just as bad. Worse.

“Donna. Please.”

“Yes. All right.” She closed her eyes as he reached for her, pressing his thumbs against her temples.

This time, it was familiar, the feeling of him moving like a vast shadow across her mind. A hundred times he'd done this, and she'd endured it. But now, everywhere he touched her, he set off glorious little shock waves deep in the core of her. His hands  
 _  
no, not hands, so many so many_

on her  
 _  
tell me Doctor tell me what that is_

moving  
 _  
again, again, do that again_

stirring a deep funnel of desire inside her.

Hands on her temples, pressing harder than he needed to, he tried to quiet her unseen body, which was now awakening and moving and stretching its limbs as he touched her again and again. So much of her was still sleeping. But she was growing brighter and stronger, changing, becoming. Still a mystery, still alien, the shape and the taste of her unlike any creature he'd ever known.

The wall he'd built to protect her waking mind long ago was hidden now, overgrown by thousands upon thousands of tendrils, many of which now openly uncoiled and brightened and reached for him as he brushed them with his mind. He blushed. It was so much. She was so beautiful, and he was so deep in her, deeper than a friend or even a lover ought to be.

“Don't move,” he said. “Try not to.”

Donna tried to keep still, and felt him holding back too, both of them unable to help leaning into each other just a little with every contact. She held her breath as he moved in her, testing, tasting.

He pulled back, gently, took his hands from her face and put his arms around her. She burrowed her face against his chest, listening to his hearts beating. His body – his proper body, the one she thought she understood – was as tense as a violin string, almost vibrating.

“Back there, on Midnight – I'd never have let you do that if I thought it would hurt you,” he said.

“Doctor. I'm fine. I mean it,” she said.

“You are. I can see that. It's just – you're so different. I've never seen anything like you,” he said, leaning back to look at her. “I don't know what you are. And you're changing.”

“You're scaring me, Spaceman,” she said. “I'm Donna Noble. Temp from Chiswick. Traveler of the universe. ”

“Yes, yes you are,” he said, breaking into a brilliant smile. “And you are magnificent.”

“That does it,” she muttered, and kissed him, hard, burying her hands in his hair and pulling him close. And then she was falling backward, reeling as he bore down on her, crushing her to the mat with fierce pent-up strength.

“Try not to kill me,” she gasped, seizing a fistful of his hair.

“Try not to die,” he said, voice muffled, nose buried between her breasts.

“You owe me one, you know,” she said, arching up under him, shuddering as he moved against her. “Time Lord, One; Human, Zero.”

“Oh, you are so going to win this game,” he said.

***

Jack leaned back in his chair, feet up on the console, nose in a Sam Spade comic. The screen in front of him was churning through data. It was basically running itself; nothing more than a Find/Replace command on steroids. Still, it would take awhile.

Every now and then his gaze flickered down to a smaller screen, glowing up through a small break in the grating below the console. It was lit up like a Christmas tree. Jack chuckled.

 

***

Some indeterminate time later, they lay still, momentarily spent. He raised himself a little on one elbow, looking down at her. “Donna,” he whispered.

“What?” She traced his collarbone with her hand.

“Nothing. I just like saying that,” he said, grinning like a madman. “Donna, Donna, Donna. Unbelievable. You are absolutely unbelievable. I literally cannot believe it.”

Even the heat of her hand on his chest made him dizzy. Humans were so feverish. He'd forgotten how good it felt.

“And here I was thinking you'd shut your gob for a change,” she murmured back, then kissed him. He rolled onto his back, pulling her on top of him, his fingers raking her bright hair. He lay under her, basking in the whole radiant length of her body on his, her maddening heat.

“You know what I think?” she said.

“What?”

“I think you set this whole thing up just so you could get your end away.”

“ _What?_ ”

“You did! Admit it!” She punched him on the arm. “Or you will, anyway. Tomorrow. While I'm in the loo or something.”

The note. He'd left himself the note, back in Cardiff. Was going to have left it. There was a quantum-relativistic future subjunctive tense for that, though it didn't translate well into English.

“Donna,” he said, properly horrified. “Please tell me you don't think I'd actually do that.”

“I was _kidding_ ,” she said. “But it makes sense, doesn't it?”

“No. No, and it's not funny, either.”

It sort of did make sense, though. No, it didn't. Horrible idea.

“My God, it was a joke. Relax,” she said.

That sort of thing kept him awake, nights. When he bothered to try to sleep at all.

Why else would he have possibly left it? The trap had been clever, sure. The ship's code was just plain weird. But none of that was worth the risk of ensnaring himself in a paradox loop.

He felt sick. To hell with his future selves, all of them.

The scowl on his face could have etched glass. Donna changed the subject.

“So tell me. Who was she, last time?”

“Hmm?”

“Your last mad affair. In the Caribbean. Who was she?”

“What? Oh.” He waved a hand at her, suddenly cheerful. “Just some Pop-Tart.”

“It must have been lovely,” she said, a little wistful. “Beaches and sunsets and things. Had they invented the bikini yet?”

“Next topic, please.”

“Or the Mai Tai? I hope you didn't wear that bloody suit of yours on the beach.”

“I mean it.”

“Were you in love with her?”

“ _Donna_. Enough.”

Donna took his wrist in her hands and kissed the soft underside of it, her mouth moving over the ring of bruises left by the metal coil. “Is she dead?”

“It's the year 5124, Donna. Everyone you know is dead. And their grandchildren, and _their_ grandchildren's grandchildren.”

She made a heroic effort to drop it. It lasted thirty seconds.

“Have you forgotten all about her? It's not like you talk about it.”

He let out a massive sigh, and fumbled on the floor for the sonic screwdriver. A buzz, and the far wall of the room blazed with stars. He zoomed through the display til he found it: a great cloud of interstellar dust the size of a galaxy, red and vermilion with the dusky light of dying stars.

“You see that?”

“It's beautiful.”

“It's named after him.”

“Oh,” she said. There wasn't much more to say, really. She slipped an arm around his waist. His back was deliciously cool against her skin. He settled back down against her, letting her hold him close.

“Don't go having any ideas,” he said, a grumpy-old-professor tone creeping into his voice. “It's not like there are a million of those things lying around just begging to get named.”

She smiled against his shoulder blade.

***

Jack started from his chair. From across the room, he heard the unmistakable _snick_ of a key in a lock. “What the _hell_ ,” he muttered.

The door opened, and in it stood a tall man with a shock of white hair in a shapeless pair of black coveralls, a blue patch over his left eye. Jack's pistol was out of its holster before the man could so much as step toward the console.

“How the fuck did you get in here?” he barked.

“With a key, Jack. Obviously. Try using your brains, for a change,” the man said, acid in his voice.

Jack hoisted the pistol in a double-handed grip. “I don't know how the hell you know my name, Captain-fucking-Hook, but you'd better keep your hands where I can see them and start explaining yourself.”

The man slowly raised his hands over his head. Then, in a motion too fast for Jack to follow, he reached out and grabbed a lever on the wall. _Has that been there all along? Christ!_ The console room briefly went dark, and when it lit up again, Jack's pistol was lying in two pieces on the floor.

The man jingled the bullets in his pocket.

“You're not going to kill me, Jack Harkness. You don't need to,” he said. “You've already won. I've come here to die.”

Jack backed away, keeping the console between him and the one-eyed stranger. _Stranger? I know him. How?_ “Who are you?” he asked, his voice sounding less shaky than he felt.

“Don't you know me?” he sighed, bitterly. “I'm the Doctor.”


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In Which Donna Has a Revelation, and a Choice.

They lay tangled together, the Doctor curled into Donna from behind, her thigh a warm weight across his hip. With the hand that cradled her head, he stroked her face, pressing his fingertips into her temple.

The moment was in flux, time coiling in wisps like smoke around the curve of her hip. Something was happening. He didn't want to know, tried not to think.

He buried his face in her neck, breathing in the warm musky scent of her skin, savoring her. Memorizing her. Their lives were so short. All except Jack, impossible Jack – who, he knew, was leaving him soon, no matter what he did.

Against his better judgment he felt a great wild hope stir in him, a hope he thought had died for good on the _Valiant_. He pushed it aside. Enough. It was enough just to be here.

Donna lay still, feeling him trace lazy circles in her mind, marveling. She hadn't expected to find this with anyone again; she'd traded it for the life they led. It had seemed like a fair swap. But to have both – and _this_ –

She froze. Something was wrong. Something was wrong inside her head. She heard herself keening, a terrible silent cry in her mind. He pulled away from her, and it was gone.

“What is it?” She reached for his hand. “What was that? I felt it!”

“I don't know. I don't know. It's the TARDIS,” he said, with real fear in his voice. “She's – she's crying. She's _grieving_. I don't understand.”

He leaped to his feet, struggling to get dressed quickly. “Donna, I'm sorry. I don't know what's wrong. Oh God. _Jack_ ,” He flung the door open, ran out with his shirt and shoelaces undone. She hurried down the hall after him, tying her bathrobe.

He stopped short in the doorway of the console room, transfixed by the sight of the man in the eye patch.

“God. Look at you two,” said the man at the console. He shot a disgusted glance at the opening in the grating. “Ooh, will you look at that, Doctor, this business seems to have gone online again. That must have been your idea, I'm guessing, Donna. Rather clever, really.”

The Doctor said nothing.

“Or was it Jack's? I highly doubt it was yours, Doctor.” He laughed, and leaned against the console, running his fingertips across dials and knobs. A spasm of coughing wracked his thin frame.

Jack caught the Doctor's gaze and mouthed silently, _He's you._

 _I know_ , he replied.

Donna took a step toward the man at the console. “I know you,” she said, reaching a hand toward him, then letting it fall to her side. She remembered, all at once. It hurt.

His one dark eye focused on her. “You shouldn't be here. I shouldn't be here,” he said. “We're all wrong, Donna. Can't you tell? All wrong. It hurts so much. I tried to fix it. To fix me, anyway. You, I can't help.”

“What have you done?” she said, a frisson of horror snaking down her spine.

“Failed,” he said.

“What are you talking about?” said Jack, stunned and frightened by how profoundly _off_ this future Doctor felt. Did Time Lords have expiration dates? “What do you need? Just tell us, we'll help you.”

“Jack,” said Donna. “Look at him. He's human.”

“Oh, my God,” said Jack, realizing. “How did you get from – no. No, that's not even possible.”

“Oh! Look who's talking!” the human Doctor shot back.

The Doctor looked at his human counterpart with disgust. “You could have harnessed the regeneration energy. Channeled it into your own body. Of course,” he said. “You would have done it. You actually would have killed me.”

“Killed you?” the other Doctor said. “I _am_ you. This is all a mistake. We'd have been the same again. Your mind, my mind. Back in one body again.” He looked at Jack and Donna, laughing a high nervous laugh. “Just another regeneration. They'd never even have known.”

The Doctor's eyes were black and glittering. “There is no happy story you could tell that doesn't end with _this_ me dying a horrible death down there. While you fly off in my ship, with my friends and my memories. God. It's worse than dying.”

“Sounds a lot like the last forty-odd years of my life.” he said. The two Doctors met each other's gaze, and neither would look away.

The Gallifreyan's face was a stone. “Rose?”

The man in black shut his single eye for a long moment. “For awhile,” he said. “You think that's enough? You made your choice, and you still thought mine would be different? How stupid are you, Doctor?”

The Doctor glared silently.

“I tell you what, why don't you just give me your ship and you can go settle down in some nice London suburb somewhere, watch telly, wait to die, see how it feels. I give you a fortnight.” He looked at Donna. “You, too, Donna. Chiswick. Imagine.”

“Don't,” said the Doctor.

“Don't what? You don't want to hear it? Seven years, Doctor, that's how long I tried.”

Jack's eyes widened. “Torchwood. You used Torchwood to get back. That was _you_ in Cardiff,” he said. His mouth was dry.

“Oh, look, it's actually _thinking!_ That's cute,” he said.

“Leave him alone,” the Doctor said, dark eyes flashing.

“Gladly,” said the human Doctor. “This doesn't concern anyone but you and me. I'd offer to take this outside, but, you know, I quite like it here.”

“You're not me,” the Doctor said. “You can't be. I'd never have done this.”

“Don't tell me what you would do, you sanctimonious prig. I know you better than you do,” he snapped. He clutched the edge of the console, white-knuckled. “You should never have let me live.”

“What did you want me to do?” The Doctor was crackling with energy, a mad light in his face.

“ _I don't know!_ ” he roared. “You could at least have given me a _choice!_ ”

“Everyone has a choice,” said Donna. The two Doctors turned to look at her, the same startled look on both their faces. “Things happen. That's life. You can't change that. But you get a choice. You choose how you live.”

The human Doctor swallowed hard, mouth twitching a little, the expression on his angular face piercing both Donna and Jack with its familiarity. “It doesn't matter. It's too late now. I've come here to beg your mercy,” he said. “If I have to die in this stinking body, at least let me die here.”

His voice grew quieter. “Please. Please, I just want to come home.”

The TARDIS shuddered, and the Doctor put out a hand to a twisting column of coral, stroking it gently. “Can you hear her?” he asked.

“Of course not. _Time Lord_ ,” spat the human Doctor.

“She's crying for you,” he said.

“Oh,” he said softly. He put a hand on the console. “Oh, my girl. Oh, I've missed you.” He turned a dial, threw a row of switches, yanked on a string. He stopped and pressed the heels of his hands to his face, trembling.

“Why didn't you come to me? I could have helped you,” the Doctor said.

“Helped me?” He laughed. “Oh, that's a good one. What would you have done, Doctor? Made me a spare screwdriver? Got any other bones you'd like to throw me?” He looked at Donna, cruelly.

“He's right,” she said. She strode toward him, undaunted, a full head shorter than him in her bare feet. Behind her, the other Doctor held his breath.

“Excuse me?”

“You're not him. You're much too human,” Donna said.

“To my eternal dismay.”

“You mean to hurt us. All of us,” she said, standing toe to toe with him, proud and haughty in her bathrobe. “That's what you're really here for, isn't it? You want to make damn sure we all know just how much you've suffered, and maybe spread it around a little.”

“Stop it. You have _no idea_ how much I've suffered,” he said.

“So human,” she said.

“Thanks to you,” he said.

“You think you know so much about me,” she said. “Well, I know a thing or two about you, too.”

“Oh, I think not,” he snorted.

“You think you're all Doctor in there, sunshine?” she shouted.

His one eye narrowed.

“The things you've seen. The things you've done. Worlds you've saved. You've had an extraordinary life. So much more than any one person could hope to deserve,” she said. “And what do you do, the minute you're not a big old Time Lord anymore? Are you grateful for what you got to see? No. You're unhappy your life is so ordinary, because think you're so much more special than anyone else.”

“ _I am_ ,” he hissed.

“Oh, I've got news for you, buster. There isn't one human being in the whole of the universe who doesn't feel that way.”

At that, the other Doctor sucked in his breath sharply.

Donna's voice was thick with rage, but there was a note of sorrow in it. “Have you completely forgotten how things work on this ship?” she said. “We all trust each other with our lives, every single day. You hate us all. I can feel it. I wouldn't trust you to toast me a crumpet.”

“I won't toast you any crumpets, then.”

“Oh, it's beyond that,” she said, quieting a little. “You should have asked him to help you. You should have asked any of us. You still could. There is nobody on this ship whose heart wouldn't break for you.”

He seized a great handful of white hair and looked up at the ceiling.

“When you come to us asking for --” She shook her head, irritated, unable to find the right word. “-- for _love_ , fine. Until then, it is either you or me. Because I am not flying with you.”

“Have it your way,” he said. He moved as quick as a lizard, pulling a teleport bracelet out of his pocket. He clamped it on her wrist and pressed the button, and she was gone.

“Donna! NO!” the Doctor roared. He wheeled on his double, sent him sprawling to the floor with a fist to the jaw. “What have you done? Where did you send her?” _Not Midnight; please, please not Midnight._

“Home,” he said, wiping blood from his mouth.

“Earth? You sent her back to Earth?”

“I think so,” he said. “That's what it's set for. Last I checked.”

“It's too far! She could die!” The Doctor knelt down on the grating, grasped the other man by his collar. His face nearly touched the other man's, and white-hot rage radiated from his eyes and his fingertips, charging the air between them. He could hear the human heart beating hard, a ragged hitch in its rhythm.

The white-haired Doctor took the Time Lord's face in both hands, leaving a dark thumbprint of blood on his temple. He fixed the Doctor in a piercing, one-eyed gaze. “Look at you, all ready to murder me over her. You made me. You _are_ me.”

“Don't,” the Doctor said. “You're not – I didn't know – ”

“Just leave me alone. I'm so tired. Is there somewhere on this ship you can leave me alone, just for a little while? I don't think I can look at you anymore,” he said, “Please.”

***

There was no reason there shouldn't be a beautiful woman lying in a beech wood in the countryside in the golden haze of late summer, her red hair spread out in glory among the first of the fallen leaves.

The bathrobe was a little weird, though, Sister Helen thought. And not half as weird as the big computery-looking bracelet on her wrist.

“Hello there? Are you all right?” The woman didn't answer. Helen bent down, concerned, and felt the pulse at her throat. Alive, thank God.

The bracelet had a button on it. She pushed it, to see if it would do anything. It didn't.

Helen hurried quickly up the path to the friary. She'd need help carrying her.

***

At dusk, in the little wood below St. Castor's Friary, a black-robed figure was moving.

From the stone cloister on the hilltop, a light in an upper window winked on, and the figure darted behind a beech tree.

“Bloody hell, I'm too old for this,” said the Mother Superior, leaning back against the tree and extracting a pack of cigarettes from a fold of her robe. She lit one and took a deep drag.

“I know, I know. I swear, I'm giving them up soon. Give me a break, I've got to have one vice.” She never looked up at the sky when addressing the Deity; that sort of thing was for novices. “That's two, though, isn't it. Along with the swearing.” She uttered a resigned little sigh. She was a firm believer in the transformative power of monastic discipline, but there were limits.

Mother Jerome didn't have much un-regimented time to herself, and the little she had was precious. There was time for prayer and study in the daily wheel of the liturgy, naturally, and as a novitiate years ago, she'd taken to the habit of _lectio divina_ gladly, like a fish to water. But sometimes one just needed a break.

Taking up smoking was probably not the most well-adjusted means of getting a few nun-free minutes every day, but it had certainly proved a convenient one. The Mother Superior was nothing if not practical.

She'd imagined, when she first came to St. Castor's, that the life of a nun would be all stained-glass windows and pious folded hands and candles. In reality, it seemed mostly about  mopping floors and weeding garden beds and the perpetual campaign to keep ancient Sister Margaret from wandering off and getting lost in the woods.

Still, the discipline of it was good for her. Each day rhyming with the one before it. So different from her life before the friary. The massive wheel of time, steadily ticking off the liturgical hours, the calendar of the year. And the Sisters were its hands.

And she loved them, she loved them, every exasperating one of them.

She'd had a frightful row with the newest novitiate earlier in the day, and sent her away crying like a little girl. Having trouble with obedience, that one. It reminded her of herself, all those years ago. Why did people think celibacy was the hardest vow? (Not that _that_ didn't have its own particular challenges, she thought ruefully.)

The root of the word, _ob-abdure_ , “to listen” – listening to the almost-inaudible voice of God in her sisters' words, always being drowned out by the horrid way Sister Margaret slurped her soup. The words of Saint Benedict, long since memorized, still did not sit easy in her heart. “Obedience should make a monk transparent to his superiors and elders” – it was a heavy millstone for her, daily, daily.

Full of fire and challenge. Many times, she'd thought they would throw her out. Instead, they'd put her in charge.

Mother Jerome turned to look at the friary, a few more windows now glowing in the falling dusk. Close up, it was hard to take, but at a little distance it was beautiful. And at the most secret heart of it, as beautiful as anything she'd ever seen. Rather like a person.

She took another drag on her cigarette, and from another fold in her black robe, extracted a small music player and earphones. A Bach fugue for the organ. Another small vice. The music surrounded her, slipping its cool protective embrace between her and the weary world, and she leaned back against the tree, watching the stars begin to come out one by one.

She'd heard someone say once that the deep slow notes of the bassline were the footsteps of God, walking up and down with measured beat in the fractally multiplying music of the world. But that's never what they'd reminded her of.

***

The Doctor pounded the console with a mallet, urging the juddering ship on, willing it to go faster. He was in a fearful rush, following the faint pulse of the teleport bracelet's signal.

Somewhere in the farther rooms of the TARDIS, Jack was watching over the prisoner. The Doctor had made the captain promise not to hurt him. He wasn't sure how much faith to put in Jack's sometimes-flexible definitions of words like “hurt.” But he'd worry about that later.

He flung the door of the TARDIS open, found himself in a lonely green country at twilight. Smelled like Earth. The snap of autumn in the air – October, maybe. At the crest of a gently sloping hill, maybe half a kilometer's distance, a group of stone buildings stood, warm light spilling from their windows. A school? In a green meadow, in the fading dusk, a group of white-robed figures were practicing what looked like tai chi.

It looked as likely a prospect as any. He ran toward the largest building, his long coat flapping behind him in the wind.

When he reached the door, he was out of breath and gasping. A young woman in jeans and a cable-knit sweater answered. “Can I help you?” she asked.

“Looking for someone. A friend. Has she come this way?” He craned his neck to see past her into the long narrow hallway.

“I haven't seen anyone. I don't live here, I just come in the evenings to help with the goats. You'll have to wait, the Sisters are just finishing compline. You can ask Sister Hildegard,” she said.

A convent, then. He was half relieved, half twitchy at the prospect of nuns. He lowered himself onto a very unforgiving bench and tried to be patient. Down the hall – voices, singing in Latin. Sounded a little like his own dear TARDIS. It helped settle his nerves.  
 _  
Please. Please let her be here._ He drummed his toes on the flagstones, fretting. If she wasn't here, he needed to be on his way, soon.

He glanced at a calendar hanging on a nearby wall, and felt his stomach lurch a little. The page at the top read “June 2001.” In London, probably not a hundred miles from here, a younger Donna Noble was busy being an ordinary human, working and playing and getting her heart broken. And maybe – every now and then – looking up at the stars, wondering if there was more to life.

After what felt like an eternity, he looked up at an ample middle-aged nun in a simple black smock, trailed by a few younger women in white. Novices. “I'm Hildegard. Can I help you?” she said.

“I'm looking for someone. Ginger. Human. Er, woman. She's my friend. She's lost. About this tall. Donna,” he said. “DONNA,” he shouted, hopefully, looking to see if she might be hiding in the rafters.

“Please don't shout,” said Hildegard with implacable calm. “We'll help you if we can. But I don't think your friend is here. We haven't seen any strangers today, other than you.”

“It might not be today,” he said. “She might get here yesterday, or in a fortnight. I can't be sure. Are you sure she's not here?” Hildegard shook her head. A nutter. They got those, sometimes.

He knew he wasn't supposed to go past the hallway, where the cloisters lay, but he had to be sure. He leapt to his feet and dashed past the startled women. “Don't!” barked Hildegard, but he was off – flinging a door open to find a room with a long rough-hewn wooden table, strewn with gears and cogs. A dozen or so black-robed nuns bent over it, busy assembling the guts of some kind of machine.

Now that was a curious thing. It looked a bit not-quite-Earth, too. Any other time, he'd have given it his full attention. But there was no time to lose.

“Please,” he said, “I'm sorry to barge in like this. I'm so sorry. I lost my friend. She's got red hair. Donna. I thought she might be here.”

They looked at him, surprised but with compassion on a few faces. Shook their heads. “I don't think so,” said one.

But already the oldest of them, a frail woman who looked about ninety, was getting to her feet. “You've come a long way,” she said. It wasn't a question.

The rest stared at her. He said nothing.

“She thought you might come. You're a doctor, aren't you?”

“The. _The_ Doctor. Is she here?”

“Oh, she's here. She never left,” she said. She turned to a younger nun. “Clare, I think you'd better take him to see Mother Jerome.”

“But it's late. Shouldn't it wait til morning?” She was tempted to add, _shouldn't we call the police first?_

“No, Sister, it won't wait. She won't yell at you. Or if she does, you can blame me,” said the old nun with a glimmer in her eye. “She's going to want to talk to this one.”

***

The young nun had pointed out the door and beat a hasty retreat, muttering something about not wanting to be the one caught interrupting Mother Jerome's reading.

He stood in the doorway. The room he gazed into was far larger than a standard monastic's cell, but only a tiny corner of it looked devoted to living space – a spartan twin bed, a rack holding a couple of folded robes, a small washstand.

The rest was taken up by what looked like the well-stocked lair of an old natural history professor. Books, charts, maps, models. A heavy wooden press for herbarium specimens. Skeletons of various animals, mounted in lifelike poses, some still in the process of being re-assembled. A great whacking telescope, obviously home-brewed. The ceiling above was curved, and partially fitted with some kind of retracting mechanism; it was half-open, and stars shone through the window above.

Bent over a desk strewn with papers, in a coarse black robe, the Mother Superior had her back to him. She'd taken her veil off for the night, in its place a coil of white hair.

Oh, but he knew her.

“Donna,” he said.

“No one's called me that in a very long time,” she said. She straightened, and turned to face him, a sheaf of handwritten equations in her hand. “Doctor.” She let out a long breath. “Oh.  You're just the same. Younger, even.”

Why had he shot off after her like that? Why hadn't he double-checked the coordinates, run the fading signal from the teleport bracelet through an amplification filter? He could have been more careful. He could have got here sooner.

Just by landing on that hillside, on this day, he'd nailed an iron spike through their two timelines, fixed them to the map forever in this spot. It was his fault. He could feel the gelatinous fluid of time freezing in place around him, doors of possibility slamming shut.

“It seems I got to Scotland afore ye,” she said, dryly, but her green eyes shone.

“How long?” he asked.

“Twenty-seven years this August. I'm busy, you know. 'Be ever engaged, so that whenever the Devil calls, he may find you occupied,'” she said. “Well, you're here now, you can help an old woman with these.” She handed the sheaf to him.

He produced a pair of spectacles from a pocket, glanced at the top sheet, saw the errors, saw the tremendous progress she'd made. _Oh, Donna, good for you, good for you!_ The characters on the page blurred before his eyes. He blinked a few times, but it didn't get better.

“You stayed here,” he said, wondering.

“I wasn't in much condition to go anywhere, at first. Weak as a kitten. But the sisters got me on my feet again. Sister Magdalen, rest her soul, that woman could make a fine soup,” she said.  “For a long time, I thought you'd never find me if I left. Then I found they needed me. Then I found I needed them.”

“You _have_ been busy,” he said, casting his eye along the spines of her books. “ _Sein und Zeit?_ You _read_ that? That one's not even _human_.”

 “Twice. I haven't spent all this time weeping and rending my garments, if you want to know. So much good work to be done here.”

The gears. Of course. They had Donna Noble written all over them. He had run past a few new-looking outbuildings on the grounds, he recalled. And something he would've liked to get a closer look at in the vegetable garden. “But, really, Donna – a nunnery? With, you know. Church? Seriously?”

“Oh, sod off, Martian,” she said, eyes blazing. “For all I know, you can tell right from wrong by smelling things with your toes. It shouldn't surprise you the rest of us benighted apes could use a little help in that department.” She glanced at a small image on the wall: an icon, the six-winged Christ of St. Francis's vision.

“Besides,” she said, more quietly. “You're not _always_ right about _everything_. You might want to remember that now and then.”

She was hard as iron, but the compassion in her voice was palpable. He could feel it surrounding him, pinging against the skin of his face and hands with a thousand tiny concussions, like a warm summer rainstorm.

On the wall behind her, he noticed another small image: a skillful pen-and-ink sketch of a familiar face. Wilf. _Must be from memory_ , he thought, glad and sorry for her at the same time.

“Where'd you get the name?” he asked, taking the spectacles off to meet her eyes.

“Jerome? They gave it to me, the day I took orders. Not exactly a Sister Mary Margaret type, am I? Saint Jerome had a legendary temper.”

“And an extensive library,” he said.

“That too.”

“Donna, come with me.” He hadn't meant to just blurt it out like that. But there it was.

She went to him then, and put her arms around him. He closed his eyes and held her, squeezing a little too hard. “I've got to hand it to you, Doctor, you've got bloody brilliant timing,” she laughed, ruefully, burying her face in his jacket.

“Time Lord,” he shrugged, not letting go.

“I'm afraid I've made rather a lot of promises. Very inconvenient.”

“You're allowed to leave, you know.”

“It's not that simple,” she said, feeling a hot lump of grief rising in her throat. She'd played this scene out so many times in her mind, and here it was, just as she'd imagined, come to brilliant life.

“Course it is,” he said. “What are they going to do, shoot you?”

“I wouldn't put it past Sister Evangeline,” she laughed, dabbing her eyes with his jacket lapel.

“Jack will murder me if I come back without you,” he said. “You'll have the death of the last scion of Gallifrey on your conscience.”

“Among my many sins,” she said, smiling through tears. “What's the penance for that one? Five Hail Marys and an Our Father, I think.”

“You're still much too young for me, you know,” he said.

“I know. Scandalous,” she murmured.

“Come with me.”

She took both his hands, and squeezed them hard enough to hurt. “No,” she said, her voice hitching a little at the word. “Doctor, I – Look at this place. Look at my girls. They learn so fast, they're doing so well. I have found such a _home_ here. And time. Time to heal. It's been so  hard and so bloody slow, Doctor, but I'm getting well. Still. I can feel it.”

How far down the path had she gone? How much of her mind still lay in shadow? Was there a chance she might even be able to –

Oh, that could hardly bear hoping for. There was only one way to know, anyway, and he hoped that day was still a few decades off.

“Doctor. How long has it been? For you?”

He closed his eyes, opened them again. “Forty-six minutes,” he said. His narrow shoulders shook. He was openly weeping now, tears coursing down his face. The sight of it startled her, almost more than his sudden appearance in her room.

“I've missed you so very much,” she said.

He rummaged in his pocket, pulled out a New Years' noisemaker, a water gun, finally the thing he was looking for. A mobile.

“Just promise me. If you find yourself – at loose ends – find me, Donna,” he said, laying it on the desk.


	7. Epilogue

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Miracles are funny things.

In a long stone hallway, two Sisters of St. Castor's Friary were whispering.

“Have you seen her?” The younger nun cast a glance back over her shoulder, hoping not to be caught gossiping.

“No.” The older sister bit her lip, hesitating. All her life, Hildegard had been suspicious of so-called 'miracles.' Hers wasn't the sort of faith that required parlor tricks to sustain itself. And what else could this be?

“Do you want to?”

“Of course I'm curious. But if something's been done to her body – Clare, I'd rather not see it.” _She was my friend,_ she didn't add. Monastic rule discouraged the formation of close personal friendships. But twenty years working side by side with such a brilliant, vital, tempestuous woman – Mother Jerome had been more than a friend, she'd been a bright light in the darkness. The Sisters were brides of Christ, but they were still human.

“What are you suggesting? Who would do something like that? And how could they possibly?”

Hildegard didn't answer.

The younger nun pressed on. “It's been three days. Evangeline says she hasn't changed at all. They're going to call the Bishop.”

The older nun snorted. “Isn't he going to be thrilled? His favorite person, a candidate for sainthood.”

Clare, who was still working through the fervent-novice phase, failed to appreciate the sarcasm. “Don't talk that way, Hildegard.”

“Go talk to somebody else, then,” she snapped. Then she saw the crestfallen look on the younger woman's face. “I'm sorry. It's a hard time for us all, Sister. Forgive me.”

At the end of the corridor, a faint light glowed from under the door of Mother Jerome's cell. Their eyes flickered to it, then away.

In the old stories, miracles were proof of God's love for creation. In the real world, they were terrifying. _Fear not_ , Hildegard thought, but her blood was ice water in her veins.

***

For what felt like an eternity, she'd been subjected to an endless parade of people through her room. Gawping. Poking. Weeping.

She was alone again now. Thank God for that. Mother Jerome was _busy_. Busier than she'd ever been in a lifetime of hard work. Every cell in her body was thrumming like a factory at full throttle.

There was quite a lot of pain. She hadn't really been surprised by that. Dying wasn't supposed to be a walk in the park. But it had been a shock, the way the first genteel pangs had given way to something much more raw and ferocious. And then there was no Mother Jerome to be shocked by anything, nothing but a single unformed point of consciousness, as the words she used to tell herself what was happening were seared away in a triumphant blast of white-hot pain.

For so long she'd lain like that, unable to move, or see. It might have been five minutes, or five days. Time stretched out into unbroken infinity. Her body was a tiny insect seized by a terrible pair of calipers. She let go and gave herself over to it, writhing without moving a muscle, prayers and obscenities and shouts of glorious power twisting in harmony deep inside her mind.

When she came back to herself again, the echoes of white agony still sounding in her bones, she felt stronger than she'd ever been.

She lay very still. Her body wasn't obeying her just yet. She tried to wriggle her toes, and was rewarded with a sickening wave of fresh pain. She settled for cracking one eyelid, just enough to get a sense of her surroundings.

Whatever she was expecting to see, it wasn't her own ceiling, the skylight half-open to the starry sky.

 _Am I not flipping dead yet?_ she thought. And, worse, _I'll have to do this all over again? Lord, give me peace._

The door opened, and two sisters hurried in.

Mother Jerome held her breath. Maybe they wouldn't notice she was still alive. Maybe they'd leave her alone. The only thing worse than having more dying to do was the thought of having to do it in public.

They knelt before her, touching her hands and feet. She heard their voices as though she were underwater, slow and from a far distance. Words sank to her ears: _incorrupt, Bernadette, beatification._

The sisters hurried out, in a soft rustling of robes.

Seized with panic, Mother Jerome tried to move, but it felt like fire. Unable to struggle, she lay still, remembering long-honed mental techniques to conquer fear. When she ran out of Psalms, she moved on to prime numbers.

Many hours later, the fire in her joints finally ebbing, she looked up at the sky again. Half-past three in the morning, by the position of the stars. Wincing, she stretched her fingers and toes; having no great trouble with that, she sat up and put her feet on the floor.

Trouble is, they weren't her feet. And her hands weren't her hands, either. Mother Jerome bit back a shriek.

It hit her all at once, what must have happened. She ran her hands over her body, over and under the  robe that was suddenly much too voluminous. Skinny, wiry, hardly any breasts to speak of, all long limbs and muscle. A shock of wild hair.

“This is _all your fault,_ spaceman,” she whispered to no one, hotly, in awe at her hands, which still glowed faintly in the darkness. She put one to her throat and felt for her pulse, and there it was: one heart beating strong and true, the other an erratic flutter. She lit a candle, shielding it with her hand, and caught a glimpse of her new face reflected in the window.

“At least I'm ginger again.” She smiled, feeling like she could bend crowbars with her bare hands. Full of the wild elation of a new body, her hearts hammering in her chest, she got woozily to her feet.

She had to decide what to do – and soon, before someone came in and accused this tall ginger person of doing away with Mother Jerome's body. She stood by the bed a long time, wrestling with her conscience. She had kept her vows to the best of her abilities, every one, through long loneliness and the agony of the soul, through her greatest temptation. But _this?_

At last, reaching some kind of decision, she rummaged under the bed for her trainers and put them on. Nearly the right size – they'd do. She opened the window and breathed a long draught of cool night air, and was delighted with the way the fine artronic mist on her breath glittered for a moment before the breeze carried it away. One long leg was out the window before she had a stunningly wicked thought.

Taking it would be so easy. It was still in her cell, even. _It's not like they could work it properly without me,_ she thought, but the thrill of adrenaline when she touched the plain wooden box put the lie to her reasoning.

She opened the box and took out a shining object, tearing off a strip of her sheet to wrap it in. Thrusting the little bundle into a pocket of her robe, next to the mobile she always carried and never used, she hoisted herself out the window again, wobbling a little as a wave of regeneration sickness made her queasy. But no sooner had her feet hit the ground than she began to run, like a colt, like a new thing.

She had no idea where she was going. Which, she thought with a surge of excitement, was the whole point.


End file.
